The Holy Terror

by Wayne Allen Sallee

  * * *

  This, then, was M.C.’s: wedged between the Broadway Surf garage and Sammon Studios, a video company, the black and pink and chrome two-story building was a far cry from the other gay bars in the North Halsted neighborhood like Christopher Street and Eric’s.

  In Ben Murdy’s own words: “M.C.’s is a semi-high tech video dance bar, and I pride myself that the music we play is not so loud ‘that customers can’t talk below a scream.”

  Six years ago, the bar had been Absinthia’s, a real shot and a beer joint with hairbag customers. The only thing Murdy kept when he took over the bar was the white canopy front. Across the street were the Green Briar and Commodore apartment buildings. In the twenties, the latter was the site of Al Capone’s mistress, who lived in the penthouse. The suite still rented at twenty-one hundred a month. An escape tunnel between the two buildings ran underneath Surf Street. The Biograph Theater was flashing its marquee a few blocks north, with the Red Lion’s mute colony directly across the street.

  Tremulis sat with Reve and Shustak, at a table facing the many television screens above the bar, each showing a music video. The Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was currently being viewed by a dozen men, most with less than rapt attention. The bar covered half the length of the downstairs along the north wall. The top of the bar was polished black, the bottom was glass blocks lit from behind.

  Upstairs was a small grey bar and a raised dance floor. The three of them could hear Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” whenever one of the bouncers opened the door at the top of the stairs. The bouncers all had receding hairlines like Hulk Hogan and wore wing-tipped tuxedo shirts over black slacks with pink or turquoise bow ties. Tremulis felt very uncomfortable when a few glances were made in his direction.

  Evan sat directly underneath a Warhol print of Murdy, done in electric blues and greens, and, compliments of the house, was sipping a Canada Dry. Tremulis sat to his right, facing the bar and the video screens, and had a Bacardi rum and Coke, overly conscious of the men possibly finding him attractive because his hairline matched those of the muscular bouncers. Reve contented herself with a Gilbey’s gin and tonic.

  “Hi, guys,” Ben Murdy waved the hand that held a Carlton 100 Menthol halfway through its brief life. Animated was the best way the man could be described. A year older than Tremulis, he moved with the strange synchronicity that befell the characters in The Wizard of Oz, any of them. Taller than a Munchkin, Murdy moved with the gentle grace of either Judy Garland or Ray Bolger, and his wicked, rapier wit was old man Wizard himself.

  He sat in the chair opposite Reve and was dressed in a pair of acid-washed jeans more black than blue topped by a black t-shirt that read “I’m O.K. You’re an asshole”. For his stature, his firm chest and compact arms would be, in the North Halsted vernacular, to die for. He exhaled his smoke before sitting down, half-straddling the chair.

  “Your hair looks lighter,” Shustak said.

  “Life’s a bleach and then you dye,” Murdy said as if Evan was his first straight man ever. In a manner of speaking. One of the bouncers overheard him and groaned. Another lamented, “Always a blond,” and shook his head in a contrived way.

  “Actually,” Murdy said. “It didn’t lighten up from the sun quote unquote in Celluloid City. I mean, get this. I’m out there at this big, you know how it is, posh party out somewhere on Beverly Glen, near where Harry Hamlin lives and this... this shmuck from Central Casting, he’s smashed, says to me, he says that Danny DeVito could do the thing better, you do know I was out there for that Tarses thing?” He paused without taking a drag off of his menthol.

  “Desmond said,” Reve answered, transfixed.

  “Anyways. Oh, hell, anyways. Geena Davis dyed my hair right there because we were both bored.” He waved the rest of the story. Tremulis heard a bass pattern from upstairs that he felt in his ears like a bleeding hematoma.

  “So you’re going after that horrid Painkiller.” The statement, the abrupt change in both subject and expression, jarred the three of them. Shustak jostled his drink.

  “Yes,” he said. “We know who he is.”

  “We think,” Tremulis added because it was true.

  “Listen to me, will you?” Murdy said. “I’m still talking in LaLa-ese. I said the word ‘horrid’. Sorry.” His cigarette was out. “Cutting down,” he said aloud, as if having second thoughts in his mind. Shustak ordered another Canada Dry. The waiter brought one of each for everyone and a dry vodka martini with two olives for Murdy.

  He sipped at it, unconsciously tonguing the inner part of his upper lip. Tremulis caught a glimpse of the blue vein on the underside of the man’s tongue and looked back into his own drink.

  Shustak was telling Murdy that he had a new phrase he was going to try out on street scum one day.

  “I’m a new drug. Try me.”

  “I like it, I like it.” Murdy said with a large amount of gleefulness.

  * * *

  The night wound on like the subway eternal, Tremulis getting just enough hooch in his system to think that maybe he could get a hard on if he squeezed his eyes shut for about a billion seconds.

  Murdy told them that his friend Milton Castle from up around Bowmanville could get them some used wheelchairs. Tremulis excused himself to go to the bathroom. Why the hell was Murdy going along with Shustak’s fantasy? he thought. Maybe he was angry, too, because gays are lumped into the same old category as cripples. If the Painkiller was out doing them, the city would blame it on their promiscuity, like they do AIDS...

  But wasn’t catching the Painkiller his fantasy, as well?

  Just what the hell were they supposed to do if the Painkiller did approach them with his toolbox of cutting things? Make the sign of the cross? Blow him away? Run him down?

  He had finished pissing; and now stood there staring at his limp dick. A machine above the urinals sold Mentor condoms. Someone had written in marker on the white machine,”It’s all in the wrist, with a deck or a cue.” Tremulis recognized the Nelson Algren epithet.

  He knew he was doing all of this for one reason. To impress Reve. He shivered at the thought. He zipped up and went back to the table.

  To Reve.

  Knowing that the only wet spot he would ever sleep on would be from his own blood.

  Chapter Forty

  Lights Out at the Marclinn, Tremulis thought.

  The lobby was empty. As if he and Shustak had walked into the waiting room of a hospital on a slow night. Nutman was there at the desk, but he was sleeping. On Insomniac Theater, Channel Seven’s late night movie theme, Zombies On Broadway was replaced by first a commercial for a lawyer who took the sting out of bankruptcy, and then one for girls like Cheryl, who are just waiting for your call on the 900 party line in your area.

  They had seen Reve into a cab and her Ohio Street apartment destination, and both were now happy to be in warmth again. How someone like Blackstone Shatner could live on the street, Tremulis would never know. Times like this, he didn’t know why he’d ever thought the life of a street person could possibly be glamorous. His fingers were like twigs, and it felt like somebody was sticking a spade underneath his left shoulder blade and getting a good bit of leverage.

  God knew how Shustak was feeling.

  * * *

  It had worn her down, the day, what lay ahead, everything. Reve Towne was dead on her feet. It was a small studio she’d lived in’ these past three years, in the Grand Ohio Apartments. The entire building looked to be built like a miniature Amtrak train, but her landlords, the Bartolis, were good people.

  She was too tired to even put on her cassette player. Roxy Music usually dissolved her waking moments. Reve undressed as she walked over to the Murphy bed, unmade going on four days now. Didn’t listen to her answering machine, like anybody was hiring freelancers in the post-holiday lull and they were all trying to reach her! The money from her student loans would last her through the summer, and she was still tossing around the idea of writing sto
ries about’ Evan as The American Dream and mailing them off to Peggy Nadramia at Grue Magazine in New York.

  In white panties and an olive t-shirt, she dug her toes into the garish red shag carpeting of the living room as if it were a new thing, installed just that very afternoon. She swayed back and forth, as if The Diamonds were playing “The Stroll” just for her.

  After a moment of this, she fell into the bed, for it was too warped to fall onto. And while others counted sheep or sexual conquests, imagined or otherwise, Reve counted the titles of...the books she might one day write.

  LEAN CANDLES IN BRITTLE TOWNS: the serial killer in America today.

  SPECKulations: Richard Speck’in his own words and some that aren’t.

  STALKING SANITY WITH THE AMERICAN DREAM: A Life In Progress.

  Could she ever write about the Painkiller? Or Vic Tremble? This she doubted, because that would mean revealing too much about herself.

  The room smelled of cedar blocks and O’Boise’s potato chips. Reve was asleep in minutes. Victor Tremulis would be aroused by the knowledge that she snored through her nose.

  * * *

  Evan Shustak lay on a cot near Tremulis. In the faint light bleeding from the Magikist lips across Randolph Street, the man with a passion for self-mutilation considered his surroundings.

  On a small valet between the two cots, Tremulis saw the glint of a plastic Illinois Disabled I.D., a. few coins, a few pills. Pink and elongated. The coins were copper, and looked like drops of blood from the red lips flashing across the street.

  On the wall was a creased poster of Superman reminding everyone that 1981 was The Year of The Disabled. Next to that, held in place by a blue tack, was a recruitment flyer for the Chicago Chapter of the Guardian Angels. And a lobby poster for Attack of the 50-foot Woman, for cry-eye.

  He looked over at Shustak, who was whispering his nightly prayers. His own prayers to The Givers of Pain and Rapture included the invocation of “bless my family and friends that I might take away their pain.”

  He looked back around the room.

  The floor was cluttered with portions of fiberglass casts and limb braces, rolls of gauze, empty prescription bottles and boxes of Band-Aids. All part of The American Dream’s, what, inventory? Disguises? Who really knew?

  Below the cot Tremulis lay on were Shustak’s comic books. Green Lantern and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, the 50s Prize Frankenstein books by Dick Briefer. Phantom Lady and The Holy Terror, these from the late 40s, the former always using her blackout powers, the latter enigmatically saying “This is my body,” or, “Thou shalt have no gods,” before bashing someone’s head into a pulp.

  Shustak had explained to him that he had received the valuable books from Barry Allen Bonasera, the owner of All-American Comics. Shustak had somehow stopped a robbery in progress, but Bonasera was still grateful enough to part with his back stock.

  Tremulis thought of Reve again, of how he sputtered a quick goodbye earlier that night. Maybe Christmas and New Year’s 1989 would be better for both of them. All three of them.

  “I’ve been intimate with Reve.” Shustak’s whisper shocked him. He thought he had spoken the fantasy words himself.

  “What?” he said, trying to make it sound less desperate than it was.

  “Yes,” Shustak spoke straight up at the ceiling. “She has seen me without my arm braces on.”

  * * *

  Shustak then returned to his own thoughts before sleeping. Tonight, The American Dream was gunned down in the Van Buren corridor, beneath the El tracks.

  But he had fought the good fight. Never to have to wake up again.

  Not ever.

  Thus was he assured of a restful sleep.

  Chapter Forty-One

  That same night, Father’s voice insisted that, for whatever reason, Frank Haid turn the wheelchair around that the headless corpse might view the black and white picture of John F. Kennedy above the Glover’s tonic and Sloan’s Liniment bottles.

  Haid spent several futile moments trying to pry Father’s rotting hands away from the wheelchair armrests without breaking the fingers off. Finally, he stepped around behind the chair, like giving the corpse a surprise bear hug, and tried not to think of the things crawling in Father’s throat cavity.

  Then, he prayed.

  My Jesus have mercy on the Soul of JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY.

  Incline Thine ear, O Lord, unto our prayers, wherein we humbly pray to show Thy mercy upon the soul of Thy servant JOHN, whom thou has commanded to pass out of this world, that Thou wouldst place him in the region of peace and light, and bid him be a partaker with Thy Saints. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

  Haid liked the way whom Thou hast commanded sounded, but after Father made him recite the obituary psalm twenty-five times, because Kennedy deserved to be remembered, the hulking man broke down in tears of fatigue.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Ben Murdy was having trouble acquisitioning the used wheelchairs, but assured Evan Shustak that he would have them by the end of the next week. Shustak wasn’t concerned at the delay, there was plenty to do as The American Dream. Priority was checking on the Painkiller’s possible haunts.

  So it was that he stood in the north side alley, freezing his ass off along with Vic Tremble. It was Saturday night, the seventh of January. The garbage cans around them were brimming with discarded Christmas detritus: brittle trees, broken bulbs, and dozens of cards filled with holiday news already forgotten.

  “I don’t follow you on what exactly it is we are doing in this alley.” Tremble was the first to speak after long moments of teeth-chattering silence.

  The halogen lighting of the alley that ran behind Eugenie Street like a hairline fracture caused both mens’ faces to take on a freakish pall. The American Dream was wearing a cream-colored ski mask as part of his costume. When he passed beneath an apartment building’s shadow, as they continued west, the blackness advanced over the Dream’s face like cancer in bone tissue.

  “Besides getting dirt and shit all over our jackets—”

  “I’m wearing my armor,” the Dream said. “As you well know.”

  “Yea, right. Right.” Tremble muttered this as a drop of numbing water fell from a pipe overhead and hit him high on his right cheekbone. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “If Frank Haid is the Painkiller,” the American Dream spoke in a monotone and scratched his right wrist brace, “and we are both dead certain that he is, from what the homicide detective Daves told me, he’s most likely going to be afraid of women...”

  “A little clichéd, don’t you think?”

  “Vic, our very existence is a cliché,” the Dream said, making it sound both sage and obscure. They continued maneuvering around piles of blackened slush. “Think about it: all of his known victims since mid-November have been men, with the exception of Wilma Jerrickson.”

  “Maybe she was a mother image for him.” Tremble conceded.

  “Possibly, though I think it was more a Virgin Mary angle.”

  “Oh, come on,” Tremble snorted. “That lady was seventy years old. If you think she was a spinster, well, like the country song goes, I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona.”

  “You’ve seen the articles from LIFE on the Catholic school fire he was in as a child.” The American Dream looked up at the sky as if he could see the image of St. Vitus burning in the purple splotches between the clouds. “What I’m saying is that this is more a religious experience for him.”

  “And you know what that cop Rizzi would say,” Tremble replied. “He’d say, go ahead, talk some shit.”

  The wind shifted as they passed Crilly Court, and they heard punk music from the Exit, behind them on Wells. Everything around them, Tremble thought, even the rat gnawing at a Styrofoam box from McDonalds, its eyes wide with futile hope, was moving away from the last second desperately. Everyone hoped for constant change. He often thought of the bankers and the secretaries in the Loop as individual neutrin
os careening through the Fermilab accelerator in Batavia.

  Yes, everything was moving forward at breakneck speed. Everything but finding the man who killed Mike Surfer. Finding the Painkiller. He looked again at the ruins of Christmas gaiety, knowing that he had hardly noticed the holiday season at all.

  Chicago’s Finest were doing their best, but when The American Dream, in his alter ego of Evan Shustak, had approached Jake Daves at the Harrison Street station house with Haid’s name, he found himself gently rebuffed. In this city, there was no Commissioner Gordon to Shustak’s righteous parody of The American Dream.

  Chicago had never been home to a Bernard Goetz, a subway vigilante. The only serial killers here were those whose victims were gay or crippled. Men in wheelchairs being killed. The city of broad shoulders, Carl Sandburg had written in the forties. Tremble added: collapsed upon an atrophied spine.

  “So, why would he come here, wherever the hell it is we’re headed, anyways?”

  “We’re just about there, a house on Mohawk Street. A prostitute.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Tremble stopped walking. “And you know exactly which one he’s going to?”

  The American Dream turned back to Tremble, his mouth a thin slit behind the mask. “There is someone for everyone when it is needed,” he said.

  “She’s known as Lullaby and Goodnight, and she’s handicapped. If you could call it that.” The light began to dawn on Tremble. They were out of the alley. A dull, beet-colored light across Mohawk washed over the Dream’s face like a blood clot bathing the brain.

  “She’s also the highest paid hooker this side of Zombie Tongue in Perdition.” He nodded for Tremble to follow him in the direction of the light.

  “You’re saying that she’s the highest paid call girl, and that—”

  “That’s right, Vic.”

  They neared a stairwell at the end of a trellised walkway. Tremble would find that the wooden steps led up to yet another elevated hell in his life. But, at this moment, his thoughts and understandings on what motivated a person to act in certain ways were for the most part naive.