LITMIR.BIZ

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said.

      That’s what I wanted someone to do for Da now. I wanted them to snap the strings that held him tight to that hospital bed and cut the cancer out of his lungs and his throat and his brain. But no one did, and he died on a hospital bed at Mount Sinai.

      •

      WE ALL KNEW LIL PAT was a junky. His girlfriend, Angie, one-upped him by being a junky and a whore. He wasn’t her pimp, exactly, but he did get high off her hustle. He had a lot a ways to score brown. He was notorious for robbing drug dealers, but the first one didn’t go so well. He was driving in his red Ford Escort GT strung-out on a three-month supply of fifty-milligram Percocet, which he ate in two weeks. He hadn’t shit in eleven days and had grown a low-slung shit-baby—a large lump of backed-up fecal matter that rose from his pelvis and dissipated at his belly button. He ate when he was high on anything; that deep thriving hunger never satiated. He’d just come home and raid the fridge, but he’d been so high he’d forgotten about laxatives. Lil Pat carried a little, black, snub-nosed .38 he’d grabbed off Fat Buck the night before. He rolled to the tip at Granville Ave. and Winthrop Ave., pulled over, and this teenage black kid in a black bomber jacket stepped up to his window, grinning.

      “Whatchu need?” the kid asked.

      Lil Pat trembled. He hadn’t slept in two days, but he had enough presence of mind to wait until the kid got close. Then, he reached out, snatched the kid’s coat collar, and yanked him in through the window. With the other hand, Lil Pat brought the revolver to the kid’s temple and said, “Gimmy.”

      The kid squealed and tried to twist away, but Lil Pat held tight. Suddenly, the kid tossed a roll of money in the window. It flopped in a cup holder.

      “Not that—the China white you been running around here.”

      The kid hesitated. Lil Pat grimaced and cocked the hammer. The kid threw in three little folded-up squares of duct tape, and they landed on the passenger seat. Just then, the front windshield splattered. A thousand tiny cracks splintered across its width. The glass was white at the center where the tip of the metal bat punctured it. Another dude in a bomber jacket yanked and twisted the bat to break it free. Thin little shards clattered atop the tan dashboard.

      Lil Pat let go of the kid. He tried to aim the revolver and shot outward through the windshield. The bullet burst a quarter-sized hole through the spider-webbed glass. The bat tugged free as Lil Pat floored it down Winthrop. The wad of cash unfurled and flapped around the center console in the breeze as the Ford knifed through the canyon of red-brick high-rises. Feet pattered at his back. Then, three shots rang out, long and clear, into the daylight.

      He drove the Ford around with the windshield like that for three days until he totaled it, high, into the iron pier of a railroad underpass. He fled the scene and reported it stolen the next day.

      He still had other less-messy ways to score—ways he’d manage when he was still buzzin’ and feeling good. My Grandma was so heartbroken over losing Da, and she loved Lil Pat so much. She’d been kind of a surrogate mother to him in the early days when Ma was just a 14-year-old girl with an infant. I guess Gram was just lonely too. Terribly lonely and sad.

      Lil Pat would go over there on cloud nine, take out the trash, and dazzle her with bullcrap about the new job he had. All the while, he stole anything he could get his hands on—cash, jewelry, checks. He had a knack for forging signatures and hustling currency exchanges and bank tellers. Since he had Dad’s exact name, he could go to the bank with forged checks, and because Dad had an account, Lil Pat could cash ’em. But after a while, sadly and sickly, Gram started playing into it. They call it “enabling,” and old people are almost always the perpetrators. So damned lonely, having so much love to give, wanting to help their son or grandson or nephew, they plop cash in their hands so they can go buy heroin, or crack, or gamble. It’s a sick world. I held a lot of animosity towards her about what she’d done, or helped Lil Pat do to himself, years later when I began to understand it all. But in the end, now, today, I can’t. They were just two lost people way, way down on their luck. Even ten, fifteen years after Da was gone, she couldn’t talk about him without bursting into tears. “Like a wildfire, Joey. I loved him like a wildfire.”

      •

      COPS AND ROBBERS, right. It’s a fun game. Both sides have their heroes, both their villains. But I never truly wanted to play the villain. I don’t know that anyone does. I always knew Lil Pat was a robber but not a villain. But when the heroin took him, he was the villain—the true villain—in all ways. Though, then, I always allowed that he be detached from himself when he was strung-out. That it wasn’t him who did those things. It was the drugs. There was solace in that, I guess, but it didn’t stop the things he did.

      •

      THERE WAS A NICKEL-PLATED .45 semi-automatic that sat in a sealed plastic bag on a shelf down in the basement evidence room at Chicago Police headquarters for a decade. It was flagged for release. It never got picked up.

      I was home sick from school. Or, in other words, Ma got tired of me whining that I was sick at the kitchen table that morning and let me stay home. This was something the old man woulda never put up with, but since he left for work before sunrise, it wasn’t a problem.

      It was around lunch time, and I’d just finished eating a bowl of Oodles of Noodles. Ma had cooked it up just the way I like it—with an egg dropped in. I headed down the long hallway from the kitchen on my way back upstairs to read my comic books when the front door slowly creaked open. It was always dark there by the door, and the windowless landing at the bottom of the stairs created a gray haze that hung there in the day with the lights out. Lil Pat stuck his head in as the door creaked opened. His eyes bugged out. His usually well-kempt goatee and mustache had grown into an uneven, stubbly beard. Scratches ran down along his cheeks, fingernail thick. He peered over my head as he slowly eased the screen door shut behind him. He glanced down at me with a false smirk and raised his index finger to his lips. His massive body trembled under his tattered, three-quarter-length leather coat, and the smell of burnt fingertips and ammonia swelled into the room with him. Suddenly, all the things my parents had said to me over the past few weeks flooded into my head: Don’t go anywhere with Pat. If you see Pat, run home. Years later, I’d find out he’d threatened to kidnap me if my parents got between him and Grandma’s money. I found this out when he started to make those same threats to my nieces and nephews, but by then, I was grown up and a different person.

      He left the door cracked open and tip-toed up the stairs. I didn’t know what to do. I walked back into the yellow-tiled walls of the kitchen where Ma stirred a pot of macaroni. I walked up behind her. The sharp smell of melted-butter mixed with cheddar cheese. I stared at her back as she dug the large wooden spoon into the pot. She must have felt my eyes on her because she stopped and turned around to face me.

      “What is it, honey,” she asked, placing her hands on the small of her back. Her heavy curves slumped.

      I couldn’t talk. I just slowly raised my head and looked up at the ceiling where Lil Pat’s steps creaked.

      “What is it?” She repeated. She stepped toward me and undid the strings of her faded-red apron, then glanced up at the ceiling.

      The sound of metal sliding across metal and then a sharp click cut through racket of the babysitting kids in the back yard. It was my father’s .45mm semi-automatic—the same .45 Dad’d used to make a statement years before. There was this junky that lived in an apartment at the end of the block named Gabriel. He was a mean, skinny Cuban with bushy eyebrows, a mustache, and black eyes. Gabriel was a known burglar operating in the neighborhood—he had to pay for his fix somehow. He’d even been caught a couple times, but it didn’t deter him.

      One night, someone busted out our first floor back window. The crashing glass triggered an instant nightmare in my sleeping mind. I screamed so loud that my parents were sure it was the second floor window that I slept under that’d broken. Sure that they’d find me, five-years-old with glass dug into my skin. But I was safe, and whoever’d broken the window was gone.

      The next night, my Dad saw Gabriel on his way up our block like nothing’d happened,

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