Joe Stanfa

Thirty-Six Leonids

 

            Chicago is a city defined by paradox. Despite the industrial forged metal, locomotive, smoke stacked landscape, it is a profoundly organic, breathing entity. Its downtown is a pounding and pulsing heart that pumps people in and out like blood cells through asphalt veins and fiber optic nervous systems. It is a city whose broad shoulders are underscored by a hairy chest of flexing, striated muscle, and whose accomplishments are ornamented by two of the biggest middle fingers on the planet. To the east it is flanked by the dildo-shaped Lake Michigan, and to the west by a sea of suburbs, each carrying its own distinct but barely discernable personality. It is one of the most vibrant, colorful, bright, and warm cities in the world during the summer, and the polar opposite in the winter full of nothing but grey. Grey skies, grey snow, grey streets, grey moods. The Cubbies in blue on the north side surrounded by wealth and culture, and the White Sox in black on the south side surrounded by poverty and crime. Underneath its giant, starched blue collar lies some of the most beautiful gardens, well-rounded museums, varied restaurants, and prestigious universities and colleges in the country.

The suburbs are the arteries, managing blood flow (people and money) as the urban sprawl grows and dissipates outward across the land consuming, consuming, consuming. They are the black hole drains for the fluffy dreams of high school athletes, writers, artists, student council members, homecoming queens, talent show stars and everything in between, swallowing all except for the antiseptic froth of mediocrity too thick to fit through its grates. Small purgatorial pockets of human existence where marriages, jobs, and lives are good enough for a societal stalemate.

 

 

Jay-jay moved to the suburbs at the age of thirteen; the worst possible age for any boy to have to be the new kid. Puberty is bad enough without having to start high school knowing no one and being unintimidatingly skinny and short, with a darkening mustache dad won’t let you shave. He was a Junior named John, and since his dad refused to allow the possibility of his son being called “Little Johnny,” Jay-jay was his solution. Throughout high school, sports took the place of a social life and then became his social life. That’s how he met Alie, Digs, and Ero, the only three friends that stuck around after the four years of pubescent hell, and the three individuals that he was sure would later be his children’s uncles.

Jay-jay moved downtown for two years trying in vain to continue a competitive sports career at the home of the UIC Flames (a mascot that held a little too much irony for a sport like gymnastics), never finding enough interest in any one particular subject to decide on a major, or enough improvement to compete. Like everything else he had ever tried, gymnastics was a sport he started just a little too late. Consequentially, he was always hiding nagging injuries and his fear of failure, tearing the soft tissues in his joints little by little until they became too serious to hide and too painful to keep practicing. And once again, like he had done with most all of his endeavors, whether it be with art projects, other sports, musical instruments or even girls, always left with the shiver of unfulfilled potential crawling down his spine, he quit and moved back to the suburbs.

This was a result, or possibly due to a combination of one of two things. One, he was profoundly stubborn and feared mediocrity so much that it usually did creep up on him, and two, since he was eight he had lived alone with his father, a man who was always too proud to admit pain and too hard to field its complaints. “Walk it off,” or “If it hurts too bad, quit,” were his usual responses, not atypical from those of most dads, but uniquely stated with a stoic, monotone callousness that seemed to begin cavernously deep in his chest and vibrate sharply through his flexing jaw muscles like knuckles on frozen concrete.

The man, like Chicago, was a walking paradox, a closet-case romantic, who had dealt with so much abuse through his old-country upbringing, and emotional trauma through his failed and volatile marriage to a woman as smart and as tough as him, that his capacity to love was as vast as his ability to act indifferent. Jay-jay had never seen him cry. He was unbelievably talented, able to compute calculus equations in his head, and to build tree forts, batting cages, tool sheds or boats without the use of blueprints or written measurements. He knew almost everything about anything from quantum mechanics and special relativity to how to draw eyebrows on a face to make it look sad, happy, mad, surprised, scared, or perplexed, and had a way of resolving Jay-jay’s problems with a single quip. He was a specimen of physicality, save for the gut, who always reminded Jay-jay of a silverback gorilla, and when he yelled you could feel the vibrations in your skull. Although he was not always the most agreeable person, he was a good man.

He built an ultra-light airplane when Jay-jay was five which he let him pilot once, unbeknownst to his mom. Secretly, he was a dreamer. He was good at almost everything he tried, but, like his son, never got more than a few bites into it. Just enough for a taste. Jay-jay had learned as much from him as he did from thirteen years of public education. He had never achieved wealth, and as much as he seemed to be at the mercy of its absence, Jay-jay suspected he never wanted it. Even if he could have afforded to get his car fixed by a mechanic, or have the plumbing redone by an actual plumber he wouldn’t have. “Waste of money,” he would say “and they don’t know what the hell they’re doing anyway.” He was proud of the knowledge and skills being poor his whole life had offered him, and it came to be Jay-jay’s assumption that he felt having money would be a disgrace to his abilities. All of this despite the fact that one of his first life lessons to Jay-jay had been: “Son, life is a shit sandwich; the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat.”

He died of a heart attack a month after Jay-jay graduated on a late June Sunday afternoon perfect for the bleachers of Wrigley Field. The windows on the tiny tri-level house down. The stumps from the dead tree in back freshly split.

 

Jay-jay was similarly dichotomous. Always good at school with little effort, he hadn’t really wanted to go to college. His dad would never have that. Ever. He wanted the easy life for his son, as most dads do, but easy never interested Jay-jay. He was determined to show his Dad that he was as tough, smart, and strong. When he was young and the belt, hand, ruler, or hair-pull-smack would come out, however well-deserved, he refused to cry or make any sound, even though he knew more licks would be the consequence. He viewed his father’s death as his last way of saying, “Because I said so,” and took it as a sign. So he went to the only college with a team shitty enough to let him walk on. Leaving, however, meant he could no longer drown himself with practice nor continue at the same school because the idea of watching all his teammates do what he could not made his stomach turn.

It was two years since his dad died. He was leaving the city, school, and gymnastics and facing the decision to quit school entirely or not. As he had done for the previous two summers, he worked for Digs painting house exteriors for rich suburbanite yuppies, and teaching gymnastics part-time at the park district. Summer, for Jay-jay, meant it was time to make money, time to work, so the days evened out to twelve hours of work, six hours of drinking, and six hours of sleep. When the jobs were there he did demolition work on Sundays gutting old abandoned factories in the south suburbs that his Uncle Mike would have renovated and then sold for four times what he paid for them.  He loved that job. Four hundred bucks cash for twelve hours of tearing shit apart and smashing walls with sledge hammers. By the end of these Sundays he would be covered head to toe in a shell of debris that was stuck to him with sweat and often blood. The buildings hadn’t been used in years, and Jay-jay guessed asbestos must have been rampant in the air as he ripped ceilings and insulation down without wearing any eye or mouth covering. Hard labor, like school, came easy for him because he never had to succeed. Just work. That was what he was good at.

Alie helped out painting one or two days a week, for which Digs would give him shit, but not enough to piss him off or keep him from returning each week. Digs needed the help, and even though Alie didn’t need the money, he did need something to do to keep himself from feeling completely irresponsible. His parents paid for school at Northern Illinois, and he worked as hard at school during the year as he partied during the summers. Plus working with Digs and Jay-jay was always fun. One lunch break, one beer break, one smoke break, and a lot of butt, dick, fart, and nuts. “I fucking farted water man,” was Alie’s code for asking for the water thermos. Jay-jay was the one that listened and laughed while working, and Alie and Digs were the two who volleyed arguments for why one’s dick was smaller than the others. Digs, having the self-proclaimed “tiniest micro-penis in the world”, and sometimes the “reverse-negative dick” (it went inside), always had a knack for knowing exactly what volume to make such declarations so that the clientele couldn’t hear. A skill most likely developed through his shoplifting, trouble-making, and locker-raiding days as a kid. On the days Alie didn’t work with them, there was a lot less laughing, but the sound of each other working was how Digs and Jay-jay communicated when they were alone. Random bouts of laughter would sometimes bounce between the two from the noise of a scraper squeaking on unscrapeable paint, or one of them saying “oh shit” in the uncannily recognizable way that the other would immediately know from the inflection alone that a bucket of primer was almost spilled, but not quite.

Ero was staying in St. Louis, the penumbral little brother of Chicago, for the summer where he had been going to school and was sorely missed. He was the pretty boy and the closest one to being the glue. He never worked out but always somehow retained the Greek god physique gymnastics and his genetics had given him. While Jay-jay listened and laughed, Ero laughed and made fun of Digs and Alie, every now and then presenting a challenge such as “I got an idea for a game; Let’s see which one of you two can go the longest without saying the word ‘fuck’.” The record was estimated at two seconds. He represented the entirety of the group’s sarcasm and wit, and it was his scathing, perfectly timed, placed, and warranted smart-ass comments that provoked almost all external confrontations when they were drunk. Although he was the one with the most organization and having-his-shit-together-ness, he was the loosest cannon. Digs, the runt of seven boys, had been a scrapper his whole life, and Alie, though raised Buddhist, had no problem if diplomacy failed. Jay-jay was looked at as the silent secret weapon whose tall, dark and observing presence and steady, weighted demeanor in such instances often diffused the altercation. The thing he found funny about it, the thing he would never divulge, was that he was always the most scared.

The engine of the crew always worked if any of them were not around, but it turned into a formula one jet fueled motherfucker with all four of them in the same place. They could all make each other laugh, but nothing compared to the ridiculous tidal waves of laughter that were nonstop and self-perpetuating when they all were together and high. What tied them together was the duality that defined each of them. Jay-jay was the tough guy outside, romantic inside. Alie was insanely intelligent and analytical despite that ninety percent of his speech was made up of potty humor codes only the other three could decipher. Digs was the ultimate mood enhancer, the entertainer, always up, always happy, except when he was the exact opposite, and he was never anywhere in between. And Ero was the chameleon who could befriend anyone never taking the typical advantage of his wealth, good looks, or charm.

The three had known Jay-jay’s dad, they called him “Mr. Jay”, as well as anyone outside the family, and knew how much he looked up to him. They had attended his humble cremation ceremony, and each of their families took turns putting Jay-jay up for the rest of that summer until school began. They had never seen him cry. This was something that the three had often discussed when he was either passed out on a floor or not around. He was not an emotional person by any means, but he was definitely warm, and a genuinely honest and appreciative friend. Among the few catch phrases he sporadically bestowed upon those people he really liked was “You fuckin’ did it buddy! You got the job!” Although he didn’t throw the zingers into conversations often, he was renowned for having at least one damn good line, joke, or comeback a year. He never seemed down and could easily be described as optimistic, but the way he seemed to internalize the loss of Mr. Jay always gave his boys an uneasy feeling.

 

With the last week of June came the first week of seasonal warmth. And even though the cooler weather that had lingered from the long, frigid winter had made working outside easier, Alie, Digs, and Jay-jay basked excitedly in the brilliantly milder temperatures, finally able to work with their shirts off, humorously shedding the white glow from their backs. They had been planning for a week to take Friday off and make the three hundred mile jaunt to St. Louis Thursday night, see the Cubbies face the Cards in their seasonal rivalry on Saturday, and bring Ero home for the next week on Sunday. “I fucking farted beer,” came the request at two on the nose, and at four the three were off.

Jay-jay had been working inordinately hard and quietly for the past few weeks, and Alie and Digs were as ready to kick it back themselves as they were to see Jay-jay do the same. On the way to the tollway they stopped at Alie’s  to pick up some bud, and the gas station for caffeine, snacks that contained mechanically separated chicken and smokes. Their typical pre-road routine.

The four hours in the car proved to fly by like the cigarette ash from the windows. Little conversations that burned bright but died quickly in memory. They covered topics from whether or not anything other than thoughts were real, to what kind of tits are the best, to whether or not it was possible to make the car explode by lighting a match with the windows up after Digs farted. His were the worst. Always silent, you would taste them in the air before you had a chance to smell them.

Jay-jay took the back seat allowing him to mediate responses between Alie and Digs as well as the ability to drift in and out of conversation as the young cornfields drifted into the colorfully darkening summer horizon to the right more easily. Plus, it kept him from having to play dj, a role he often got shit for because all he ever put on had a bpm of no slower than 200 and usually had pretty shitty vocals. His mind drifted to the summer he and his dad were driving back to Texas from Chicago. He was almost ten and as they got into Texarkana “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” by CCR came on the radio. “Just got home from Illinois…” was the first line.

“You in?” Alie held a freshly packed bowl in front of Jay-jay’s face and within a minute a dull warmth crept through his skull and his eyes became red. Good. Less thinking. “So, captain poopy-dick, are you going back to school in the burbs or the city?”

Dammit. All he could say was: “Not the city.” The brevity of this made Alie and Digs share a glance, and before they could continue Jay-jay said he didn’t know what the fuck he was going to do and that the only two things he cared about right now were getting to Ero’s and the Cubs winning on Saturday. He knew what the glance meant. Knew they were already starting to look out for him, and he felt embarrassed.

 

They reached Ero’s apartment around ten. “You dirty fuckers better shower before we go out, you smell like Digger’s ass.” Ero greeted them all with hugs and kisses on the head. They got inside and made quick work of the case of Shitty Ice Light all taking turns in the shower while the others smoked, listened to songs Ero had written and recorded on his computer, and continued the kinds of conversation they left in the car. The laughter began as though no time had passed since they last hung out. It was like they were all still twelve, just in twenty-one year old bodies, and instead of tree forts, they had apartments.

Ero’s was particularly nice. He had plenty of room, a big leather couch, and two beds free since his two roommates were home for the summer. The hard wood floors were old but well kept as was the wood molding throughout the apartment. Ero’s room had been the servant’s quarters when the place was built in the twenties and was much cleaner than the other two rooms that looked as though their occupants might return at any second. Always the most gracious host, Ero reiterated that this was to be treated as their home for the weekend.

Once they were all ready the crew went out onto the large front porch to wait for the cab and each took a swig from Ero’s bottle of vodka. It was almost midnight and at this point Digs was getting loud, Alie was getting louder, Ero was getting smart, and Jay-jay was laughing through the dizzy thinking how much the cabbie’s job must suck with the four of their belligerent asses in his cab. He sat in the front trying to remember the name of the place Ero said they were going, examining the degree to which the calluses on his palms had softened since he quit the team, and fighting a growing burning in his eyes. He remembered his father’s hands. Thick, tough, nails he used to cut packing tape.

“WAIT! This is the place!” Ero’s voice cracked sloppily trying to turn his laugh into a yell, and the sudden stop put the hair on Jay-jay’s neck back down momentarily. He threw a twenty at the cabby and got out first to help organize the exit of his friends. His legs already felt shaky and he decided to combat his eyes and the overwhelming feeling in his chest by drinking more. This way he’d at least have an excuse if he cried or fell to his knees, an abominable act he was beginning to fear might happen. He felt like he was forgetting something. Like he couldn’t decide which direction to walk if he was lost and had only two minutes before a job interview. They all lined up to go in, Alie and Ero in front talking about a girl one of them had hooked up with. Digs in front of Jay-jay sensed his tension, something he had very rarely felt in Jay-jay.

“Jay-jay. You all right, dingle-berry? You feel ok?”

He wanted to beg them to go back to Ero’s and chill, and smoke, and drink and talk. He felt like panicking, wanted to beg them like he wanted to beg his dad not to put him in the ultra-light when he was five. His stomach felt the way it did when the ultra-light lifted off, or what he imagined it would feel like right before jumping out of a plane. He wanted to ask for them to help him get this out of his system, and he knew they would head back in a second if he said the word. But he couldn’t.

“I’m fuckin’ fine. I ain’t got time to bleed.” He tried meekly to joke.

Suspicious, Digs took his word, but covertly told Alie and Ero minutes later to keep an eye on him. “I don’t know, but somethin’s goin’ on up in that dome.”

Ero had noticed earlier in the week that this weekend was the second anniversary of Mr. Jay’s death and had internally wondered whether or not to bring it up to Jay-jay. He had decided against it and forgot about it until now. Something unexplainable about how memory works popped this thought into his head at that moment, and as he watched Jay-jay stumble back from the washroom, eyes down, saw for the first time how heavily his friend walked. “Jay-jay! Get your sexy-ass over here now! We’re doin’ a shot.”

Alie immediately recognized this and took Digs to go make a few rounds scouting the talent in the beer garden. Jay-jay hugged Ero and sat on the stool he had pulled out.

“It’s fuckin’ good to see you, boy.” Jay-jay said, stomach tight, “What do we got?”

“We got another vodka comin’ up, baby.” With that he ordered two from the relatively cute, smiling bartender who’d been waiting for Ero to order something from her for a few minutes.

“Hey man, you seem like you’re somewhere else tonight.”

Jay-jay stumbled to find words, eyes almost welling up, “Dude it’s just been a long week. I’m fine. Just tired.” Even if he wanted to explain, he couldn’t figure it out himself.

The shots were ready.

Ero suggested toasting after, and with that the hatches opened.

“So, I was thinking. It’s been about two years, man. How ‘bout we toast that one to Mr. Jay?”

Jay-jay’s ears tingled, eyes immediately beading up as he tried to stand, shaking his head almost involuntarily. It felt as though an elephant had just sat on his chest. His legs buckled and he caught the stool as Ero, frightened, reached to grab him. Jay-jay shaking his head, trying to shake away tears, got back to his feet, embarrassed, scared, drunk, about to implode, pulled Ero’s hand off of his arm and shoved it away. Cloudy headed, barely able to see, spinning, he tried to stumble away and headed for the door. Wanted to run. Couldn’t breathe, heart pumping in his ears. He clumsily pushed his way through the crowd entry and out into the night. As he turned left he bumped through the middle of a four man wall, shoving his shoulder accidentally, and uncaringly, into that of the middle left meat slab.

“You fuckin’ asshole! Open your fuckin’ eyes, dick-head!”

And a circuit was tripped. Jay-jay, on the sound “ckhead”, was already whipped around, grabbing meat slab’s blonde hair, and winding up. Open handed SMACK. Across the jaw. The sound of belt on ass. He saw nothing as he jumped on meat slab. Only felt anger, and hate. For his father. An explosion. He hated his dad for never showing him pain. Hated him for carrying it. Hated him for letting it well-up in his heart and letting it kill him. Hated him for never saying anything. Hated him for never going to the doctor. Hated him for his toughness, and his wasted talent, and his wasted dreams, and his wasted years. Hated him for dying alone.

In that singular moment, all he felt was pain and hate.

And something hitting his fists.

And then his skull.

And then red.

And then black.

 

Jay-jay awoke to sunlight tracing quivering shadows through teenaged leaves across the wall. His head was wet and throbbed sharply. His right arm hurt too bad to move, his ears felt muffled, and he needed to piss worse than he could ever remember. He sat up carefully, melted ice bags falling off  his head and arm, and noticed he was on Ero’s bed. Ero on the floor wrapped in blankets and decorated with a few slight bruises on his face. He turned to get up, and pain shot electrically down his left side into his hip. His shirt had dried blood covering the front of it and his arm was swollen and purple above the elbow. Not broken, just severely bruised. He gathered that a rib or two was broken, the pain being reminiscent if not identical to that of the rib he had broken his junior year of high school falling out of a handstand onto a parallel bar.

Ero shuffled. “Morning sunshine. I hope you don’t feel as bad as you look…”

“E, I don’t remember much… I’m sorry,” tears welling, “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, it’s Digs you should be worried about. You gave him a good ol’ shiner last night. I think it was an accident though. How’s your eye?”

“My eye’s fine. It’s my goddam ribs, man. What the fuck did I do?”

Ero explained that Jay-jay bitch slapped one of Wash U’s crew team in front of three of his teammates after he scrambled out of the bar. Ero had followed him outside, jumped in the mix, and got hit a couple times trying to stop it. Alie and Digs came outside when the smiley bartender told them their friends were getting in a fight out front, and the cavalry came, mixed it up, and dragged him the fuck outta’ there before the cops arrived. All-in-all the ordeal lasted about two minutes, and Ero made sure to inform him that the cut above his eye he had still not seen was self-inflicted on a wall while Digs was trying to carry him away. Digs’ black eye was from the ricochet of his head off the wall and is what finally knocked Jay-jay out.

“Your lucky Digger’s head’s harder than yours. It sounded like a fuckin’ homerun when you hit him.”

Alie dragged Ero out and was the only one not to get a battle-wound. They walked about six blocks, carrying Jay-jay’s limp, unconscious heap through alleys into the projects and called a cab.

“I’m just real fuckin’ glad we were there last night, man. I think you finally need to get some shit off your chest, baby.”

 

They decided to go back home that night. Everyone was relatively fine, and retelling the story became a humorous sobering task for the first hour of the drive. As always, the four used laughter to cure the pain. Even though it hurt like hell for Jay-jay, it felt really good to laugh loudly. They got him talking about the night before, and gymnastics, and Mr. Jay for a good while in the car, and for the first time he cried in front of them. He was more exhausted than he had ever been, and even though Ero and Alie fell asleep in the back seat, he couldn’t. He found it helpful that Digs was driving. They both liked hearing each other think.

As they drove northward that late June night, back towards the giant middle fingers and the giant black hole suburbs, Jay-jay looked at the window, up at the stars. He remembered his dad telling him about outer space when he was five. He remembered falling asleep on the roof with him, bundled up in sleeping bags, when he was eleven on a crisp, cold October school night. Counting thirty-six Leonids before succumbing to sleep. The only time his dad had ever let him stay home from school. He didn’t see any shooting stars as he stared through the car window, But he knew where he was going for the first time ever.