Men of the Mean Streets

by Greg Herren

  These were heady days for the boys, too. For a while, Jon became obsessed with the kaleidoscope. At any mention of Philip, Jon would ask, “Can we go over and play with his kaleidoscope?”

  Colin would look at him shrewdly. “Are you my best friend?”

  “Yes,” Jon would answer. “You know I am.”

  “All right, then. I’ll ask him for you.”

  *

  It wasn’t until he’d known them for several months that Philip told Colin and Jon how he came to have so many of the newest records. He and another friend, who went unnamed, had a little shoplifting gig they operated on the weekends, keeping the best of the music for themselves and selling the rest at a considerable discount to friends from out of Philip’s basement apartment.

  Philip looked Jon in the eye and said, “But it’s a secret, right? I trust you not to tell on me, buddy.”

  Jon nodded with a worried expression, as though he scarcely dared hope he could keep Philip’s secret to himself. Colin made him swear not to tell. It would be a secret, they agreed—a secret shared by just the three of them.

  Later came other secrets—lewd stories about girls and late-night seductions, filled with crude humor and exaggerated details. Colin smirked, while Jon tried to look as though he knew what the older boys were on about.

  “What does this remind you of?” Philip asked one day, brandishing the kaleidoscope’s smooth black tube aloft. “Hey?”

  Colin smirked.

  “You know, don’t you, Colin?” Philip said.

  “Yes,” Colin said. “I know.”

  “Smart boy,” said Philip.

  Once they tried the kaleidoscope under a red light, and it seemed even more magical. And once the kaleidoscope was passed around in the dark, where they didn’t even try to see out of it. They told Jon just to hold out his hands and grab onto it, but it felt different then, and Jon thought the older boys were playing a trick on him.

  *

  After his first failed attempt at rehab, Jon moved to a ramshackle bungalow on the outskirts of town. When Colin came to visit, he saw the broken window beside the front door. He knocked and tried the handle—locked. Without thinking, he reached in through the jagged glass and lifted the latch, wondering how his brother could live in such desperate conditions, before it dawned on him that his brother lived with a much bigger risk every day of his life.

  Jon was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette when Colin entered. He didn’t express surprise that his brother had just walked in on him unannounced.

  They talked for a while. Colin couldn’t remember ever feeling so distant from his brother. Whoever this person was who claimed to be Jon, Colin didn’t know him anymore.

  “How are things with you and Viv?” Jon asked.

  “Fine. Just great.”

  “That’s good.”

  Colin watched him sitting there for a moment. “You should get yourself a girlfriend.”

  Jon just looked at him.

  “You’ve got to do something, Jon.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…because it’s wrong.” His face clouded. “It’s disgusting. I don’t approve of what you’ve done to yourself.”

  “So I should change because you don’t like it? Will you stop being my friend if I don’t?”

  “Don’t say stupid things. This isn’t my fault.”

  “No, of course it isn’t.”

  Jon seemed to have drifted off again then said, “I’m thinking of getting a job.” He shrugged. “Maybe that will help.”

  But of course, the job never materialized, if he even started a search for one.

  *

  The year Colin started high school, their parents began to quarrel. Colin heard a rumor that his father was having an affair with one of their neighbors, Miss Lavoie. He started a fistfight with Steven Bailey, the boy who’d told him, screaming in the hallway outside his locker that it wasn’t true. Steven wouldn’t take it back, however, and he and Colin never spoke again for the rest of their high school years. Colin also avoided Miss Lavoie and refused even to walk down the street she lived on, as though it had been forbidden to him.

  The quarreling usually began when their father got home from work at night. Sometimes, if he’d stopped after work for a drink, it might escalate into yelling. Colin and Jon would sneak over to Philip’s house for some relief, returning after their parents had gone to bed.

  If their mother protested, Colin would argue that it was better than sitting around listening to his parents scream at one another. Anything, he said, was better than that. His mother would lapse into silence or the tears that seemed to come more frequently as time wore on.

  It was Philip who explained the nature of sexual affairs to the two brothers, saying they were quite common now, as though he’d had a lot of experience with such things. On the way back from Philip’s that night, Jon was silent till they returned home.

  “I hate him,” Jon whispered to Colin.

  For a moment, Colin wondered if he meant Philip or their father.

  *

  One night Colin overheard his mother on the phone with her sister Margery after everyone had gone to bed. She was talking about divorce. It never came to that, however. The fighting seemed to end one day as suddenly as it began, restoring peace to the home once again, though by then a coldness had set in, like the Cold War the world was going through. It was hard to say exactly how it manifested itself, but there was a menacing chill in the air whenever his parents spoke. Something had shifted, bringing in a less favorable climate with it.

  Colin could feel it, even if he couldn’t put his finger on what, exactly, had brought about the change. By then Philip, too, seemed to have receded into the background of the boys’ lives. Jon was eleven by then, and Colin nearly fifteen. Philip was already twenty-one. So, too, the kaleidoscope came out less and less often, like a joke no one spoke about anymore.

  “He’s too old for you,” their mother once said, when Jon said he and Colin would be seeing Philip on the weekend. “It’s not natural for a boy so much older than you to be spending so much time with you. Find some friends your own age.”

  And then the day came when they stopped seeing Philip altogether. He suddenly joined the army and they almost never saw him, except for brief glimpses on the street at Christmas when he came home from his base, his hair shorter and his expressions harder.

  *

  Later, there were girls in their lives. Roger seemed especially happy that his sons were dating. Colin was popular and had his pick. He was getting a reputation around the neighborhood. Jon’s relationships were fewer and less easily defined. First, there was a short redhead named Maisy or Daisy—his parents were never sure, just as they could never tell quite what her relationship with Jon was. She disappeared suddenly, never to be mentioned again. She was followed by a pretty blonde who seemed more interested in Colin than in Jon. She eventually disappeared as well.

  What his parents never knew was that all the girls Jon dated left him saying he was weird or even cruel. At school, Colin heard more rumors, this time that Jon had asked them to do strange things. Things that disgusted them. None of his relationships lasted long, and most of the girls pretended not to know him or acknowledge him in the hallways afterward.

  *

  Times changed. The old sounds were gone. The upbeat optimism of the sixties had been replaced by harsher sounds—heavy metal, glam, punk. By comparison, the seventies seemed duller, angrier. The Beatles had broken up, the Rolling Stones cut a disco record, and all that goodness seemed forever behind them. Whatever it had been, whatever it had touched, seemed lost.

  Colin moved forward with the age, embracing punk rock and then New Wave. He seemed to surge into life, while Jon seemed to have got stuck, listening to the same old records he’d listened to in his childhood.

  “Some people never grow up,” Colin once told his mother when she expressed concern about Jon’s seeming lack of development or interest in anything o
utside the home. “Mouse is one of them,” he said, the nickname having stuck by then.

  “Wherever did he get that horrible name?” Lucille suddenly asked, after having heard it used for years. It was as though she’d just woke to the reality of Jon’s life for the first time.

  Colin shrugged. “Some guys gave it to him,” he said, as though it were of no concern.

  *

  Colin had just turned thirty when their father had the stroke that confined him to a wheelchair. They could hardly understand him when he spoke. From that time on, he ceased to be an active force in the family. Lucille relaxed a little, though there was still the problem with Jon.

  A legacy from a benevolent grandmother was the final touch that contributed to Jon’s unending descent into his hell of drugs and otherworldliness. It provided him just enough money to live on and buy his drugs without having to interact with the world, unless he so chose. Severing that last lifeline of necessary contact with others was what killed him, Colin would say in later years, perhaps with more than just a little sense of his guilt implicit in the statement.

  They never saw Philip anymore, though his mother still lived down the street. She and Lucille had struck up an unexpected friendship. The latest news was that Philip was on his third marriage in only ten years. He just seemed to have rotten luck with the girls he met, his mother would tell Lucille, shaking her head in bewilderment.

  *

  It wasn’t clear when their parents first understood the seriousness of Jon’s situation. Like many things difficult to accept, the knowledge seemed to dawn on them gradually. Colin expressed bewilderment whenever his mother pressed him for reasons why his brother would turn to drugs to the extent of closing off the rest of the world around him.

  “What happened between you?”

  “Nothing,” was all he said. “Just boys—you know.”

  She shook her head sadly. “He so looked up to you, you know.”

  Colin turned away.

  Lucille blamed herself for not having paid enough attention to her youngest son; she blamed her husband for the affair that had turned love to anger and finally to a lasting resentment. She blamed herself yet again for staying with Roger rather than divorcing him, as she’d once threatened to do, thinking that had she done so she might have expelled the demon from their lives that had turned their son against himself.

  There was no answer and nothing that could console her for what Jon had become. Nor could she share the guilt with her husband; since his stroke he had all but turned inward, only banging his cane against the side of his wheelchair at times and screaming in nearly incomprehensible rage that he hated her for what she’d done to him, that she’d denied him any lasting happiness with her frigidity and her willfulness in making him give up the one love he’d found in life. She had wanted to spare her sons such uncaring anger, but now here it was.

  By then, both Colin and Jon had moved out, however, so neither of them had to deal with it directly. For that, she was grateful.

  Not surprisingly, Lucille finally turned to the religion she had once forsaken. She recalled the Calvinist Church’s doctrine of total depravity, how every person was born into the service of sin, and of its opposite, the doctrine of irresistible grace that could be applied by God alone to those whom He is determined to redeem, bringing them to a saving faith. She was counting on the latter to see her through it all.

  *

  Colin stopped dropping by Jon’s place. Sometimes more than a month separated the visits. One day, however, he felt a sudden urge to go. He drove over and knocked. The broken window had finally been replaced after years of letting the air into the interior gloom.

  Colin’s knock reverberated with a dull certainty. There was no answer, no stirring to say that Jon had heard his knock. The screen door was unlatched, but the wooden door was locked. Colin brought out the key from his pocket, the key he’d never used before, and let himself in.

  He didn’t want to be there. He was in a mood. The day before, Viv had told him she wanted a divorce. She wasn’t interested in keeping up the pretense of a marriage any more. She’d known all along, she told him. Colin felt panic at the thought that he would shadow Philip in such things, this marriage not the last in which he would try to hide.

  He wandered about, getting used to the dark, tripping over a bag of garbage left inside the doorway. He sniffed the air. How many pick-ups had passed while it sat there?

  He delayed raising the blinds, as though to ward off the light—and the inevitable—a few moments longer. He wanted to hold onto the world-as-it-was before he let in that final, irrevocable fact that could never change, could never be reversed.

  Jon lay sprawled on the couch, his body scrawny and shrunken, wearing only a T-shirt and socks. It was as if he’d fallen asleep watching TV, except the TV was turned off and he was staring slightly off-center at a shelf of books. What was it, Colin wondered, that had caught his attention in those final seconds of fading away? He followed Jon’s gaze to the shelf and the tip of a long, black tube just visible behind a pile of books.

  It was the last thing Jon’s mind had had any conscious awareness of as he slipped away into whatever region he’d gone to. Colin went over to the shelf and plucked down the kaleidoscope, twirling it in his hands. How had his brother come to have it after all these years? Had he stolen it or had Philip secretly given it to him all those years ago?

  For a moment, standing there, he felt like an insignificant figure in this drama, rather than its chief perpetrator.

  “Poor Mouse,” he said, shaking his head. “Poor, poor Mouse.”

  He remembered Philip’s question: “What does this remind you of?” and Jon’s sobbing when they made him hold out his hand.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Suddenly the emotions came surging up. He smashed the tube against a wall, shattering it and sending the pieces flying in all directions. He began to sob. The feelings took a long time to die out, the sobs coming a little less frequently until finally they stopped altogether. Colin wiped his hand across his face, rubbing away the tears.

  He thought of Philip then, and all the hours spent at his house, away from Philip’s parents, who had left them on their own downstairs without enquiring what their son could possibly be doing with two boys nearly half his age. They never asked. Nor had Colin’s parents asked why he suddenly had so much spending money when he didn’t even have a job.

  “It feels like a mouse, doesn’t it?” Colin could hear Philip asking, and waiting for them to reply.

  “Yes,” Colin had spoken up, the older of the two. “And Jon likes it.”

  Jon glanced up at his older brother with a questioning look.

  “Go on, touch it,” Colin encouraged him. “You like it, don’t you, Mouse boy?”

  Jon looked up at his brother with something like love in his eyes. Love and trust. “No, I don’t like it.”

  “Sure you do. You like it, Jon. Pet the little mousey.”

  “I don’t want to do it.”

  Philip’s laughter drowned out Jon’s words. Colin joined in as the tears began to well in Jon’s eyes. A hard look came into Colin’s face. “Don’t cry,” he commanded. “Don’t cry or I won’t be your best friend anymore.”

  Faithful

  Michael Thomas Ford

  I knew when Jake came in and sat on the edge of the bed, not moving, that it had gone wrong. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t touch me. He just sat there, his hands in his lap, swallowed up in the darkness while I waited for him to speak.

  Usually he was the hardest after a hit—shedding his clothes as he walked in the door and slipping into bed next to me so I’d feel the length of his cock hard along my ass, his balls heavy against my thigh.

  “Come on, baby,” he’d say in his low, throaty voice as he moved his mouth over my neck. “Come on. I need to fuck you.”

  Before I could even wake up, his fingers would already be squeezing my nipples as he pushed inside me, a man possessed. His pric
k on those nights was strangely hot, like steel radiating heat from the inside, and as he thrust fiercely against me he seemed to be trying to outrun whatever fiery demons held him in their grip. It was as though everything he felt from seeing some man fall under his bullets needed a place to explode, before it burned him up from the inside and sent his soul scattering across the sky. He’d fuck me hard and quick, and I’d come just from the touch of his fingers on my tits, knowing that the last thing those hands had done was kill.

  But this night was different. This time, there was only silence. I felt my heart beating, and the familiar rush of blood to my cunt that accompanied his return. But I knew from his stillness not to touch him, and I lay in the darkness, the sheets bunched coldly between my legs, as I waited for him to return to me.

  “We made the hit,” he said finally, his voice quiet as a stream of chill air.

  The hit. Richie Marotta. They’d been planning it for a long time. “So, what’s the problem? You guys have been after Richie for months now.”

  He rubbed his hands through his hair. “Yeah, well, this time someone got in the way.”

  I sat up, pulling the sheets around me. I could feel the coldness of Jake’s mood against my skin like rain, and it made me shiver. “Who?”

  “Corelli,” he said softly, as though speaking the name any louder would invoke some kind of evil spirit.

  Corelli. Jimmy Corelli. Head of the biggest syndicate on the East Side. He’d been in power longer than anyone else in the city. No one dared touch him. He let the smaller guys do their business uninterrupted while he looked after the big operations. In exchange, there was the unspoken agreement that none of them would try to get too big. Killing him was like spitting in the face of God.