by Brian Hodge
Girly-Girl
I often wake up imagining the soft, padded footsteps of the first one, all grown up and out for blood. I can hear the harsh breathing outside my bedroom door, the sharp claws clicking impatiently, waiting for me to acknowledge that I hear them. Hear her mewling for revenge.
That time we had to take Girly-Girl away from Audrey was a weird thing. Tom Wolniak and I were sitting around not doing much of anything when my ma called me over and asked if we could run an errand for the Gazzaras. They lived a block down from us on Monticello, this was back in the seventies before all the Puerto Ricans moved in and the neighborhood was shot to shit. I figured we were expected to carry some trash out of the basement apartment or something, but Ma told us to drive down the alleyway by Belden in Tom's car.
Even though there wasn't jack going on, it being too humid for much of anything, even lawn darts, I made a point of pissing and moaning a bit about why we had to go over there. I figured it was good to call in a marker for one day when I came in after curfew. Tom Wolniak was my best friend back then, and he was two years older than me. Tom had the wheels, like I said; an old beater Dodge Polara, plus he would do about anything for my ma. (Tom's a fireman on the far South Side now, and I figure that there's no reason for Girly-Girl to be sniffing through the embers of her early memories for him; no, I am the only one she wants. No matter, we gave her a good home).
That's why she wanted both of us to go over there, kind of to keep one from chickening out on the other.
Audrey Lynn Gazzara was eighteen and retarded. Tom and I were best friends because our respective parents moved within houses of each other in the Logan Square neighborhood the same summer, 1967, and we often found ourselves keeping an eye out for her. She was apt to talk to factory workers coming off-shift, and her parents were concerned about some of the troubles starting up once Martin Luther King was assassinated.
We reminded her, when we saw her at the Osco drugstore or the Biograph Theater, to remember and not let anybody in the house, even if the person said that he was the meter reader or the phone repairman. Her father worked for Illinois Bell, and her mother at times had to attend to several other widowed neighbors, one a diabetic. It was easy to understand how Mrs. Gazzara could become frazzled and impatient at times.
I could shoot my mouth off at Ma, and I didn't even have any responsibilities. Yet.
Until it was time to take Girly-Girl away.
The only other time I could recall before that was a month earlier, when I was coming home from the bakery and saw her hanging out with some stringy-haired guys in back of the Tapped Out Tavern on Fullerton. They weren't ridiculing her; actually, they looked more stoned on tic, but still... I told her she best be getting home. She might have had a crush on me.
She'd spent a lot of time at the taverns. She could actually get in one by that autumn, as the drinking age in Chicago stayed at nineteen until 1978. Mostly, the group would sit and drink Colt .45 malt liquor at the curbside, daring the cops to do anything. In the mid-seventies, all the cops were concerned with, as a decade before, was the changing color of the neighborhood.
Getting back to the incident with Girly-Girl, Ma said to us that Audrey couldn't take care of little Girly-Girl and that we had to get rid of it someway. Take it to the agency.
Everyone had thought, or at least held on to a manic hope, that she'd be able to care for it, but Mrs. Gazzara had said it was as bad as if her daughter had brought home a stray. Girly-Girl was legit, bought sight unseen.
The only strays in the Logan Square were junkyard dogs, haunting the ghosts of the butchered hogs that Upton Sinclair wrote about.
Now I'm the one feeling like a stray, the guilt of what I did so long ago, of how I enjoyed it, tied around me like a can wrapped with frayed string around a ragged, bleeding tail.
I wondered why Mr. Gazzara was so non-committal about the whole thing, and didn't find out till much later that he'd taken to having an affair with one of the secretaries in the collection department. She drove a 1978 Thunderbird and her boyfriend came by one day and tried stabbing Mr. Gazzara in the balls out in the gangway.
With that one family alone, I was learning to fear growing older, of how I might do things I never would have thought of then. Getting a chill when I saw the baby Audrey thought of as a kitten.
Audrey had been forgetting to feed it. She was sitting in the backyard, watching it roll around on the grass. Now, the girl wasn't completely dumb. Her dress was buttoned right, her hair combed neat. A full black head of hair, all ratted out in a nice way, a thin line of white already growing in like the Bride of Frankenstein.
But Girly-Girl hadn't eaten all day. Audrey just forgot.
It had been a bad idea of her parents to let her have it. A bad idea, all around.
Girly-Girl wasn't even a month old. We hated like hell to have to go over there. It was better to get going before rush hour. Audrey was sitting on the picnic bench. When we told her what we were going to do, and what we were going to have to do with Girly-Girl, all the time avoiding words like "anti-cruelty" and "shelter" in case she might think we were calling her an uncaring person, she held Girly-Girl tight in her arms.
The way she held onto Girly-Girl the way she did, it made me think of a stray we once kept around, a cat named Whiskey who took to fighting with other toms during the summer nights. We had told Audrey that we took the cat to a shelter. What she didn't know was that I went out one morning and found him with half his skull chewed up.
Me and Tom had taken Whiskey to the vet and they put him to sleep.
Audrey had to remind me of that. She petted Girly-Girl's forehead, scratched its nose. We said we had to get going.
The Gazzara house had high hedges on either side, so Tom and I didn't care too much if Audrey started crying after we left. It wasn't that we were heartless, but we had been thrust into a position neither of us liked.
Audrey did cry, but we had told her as honestly as possible that we were taking Girly-Girl to a place up in Albany Park where it would get a better home. I looked back as we left through the back gate and saw her bouncing Girly-Girl's red ball against her foot.
What happened right after that couldn't have been stranger if we had planned it. We were at the light on Pulaski, the windows down because the Polara wasn't equipped with air conditioning. I'm looking down at Girly-Girl, Tom's waiting for the light to change, when I heard a voice.
"Ain't she a pretty thing." A deep voice from past my right shoulder, Tom and I looked at each other for a second, then I glanced out the window. There was a beat-up white van in the right turn lane, its driver pale and clean-shaven. He was staring down at Girly-Girl, its head resting on my thigh.
I stroked its forehead. "How cute," the man in the van said. I looked at the logo under the door. SESKAR'S CARPENTRY. I figured him for owning his own business. "My wife would love her. Or is it a him?"
"No, it's a girl." Tom was looking at me, shrugging his shoulders. I wondered if the guy would rather Girly-Girl was a boy, the way some people choose their breed of cat. We didn't know this guy from white rice, but still. He had his own business, shaved regularly, had a wife...
And this was sixteen years ago, the impersonal shit that goes on daily now didn't happen back then. I didn't figure him for one who went around kicking small creatures. Back then, neighbors weren't breeding pit bulls and fathers weren't putting razor blades in their kids' Halloween apples.
How wrong I was, I realize now. I mean, I know that the life I lead now is sick and depraved, but this is the nineties. How was I to know that the bastard in the carpentry van was looking for a little kid to play dress-up with as she grew older? And I have to wonder if it were the fact that we were driving her to the adoption agency as if she were some kind of stray that he started fucking her while she was dressed in a cat suit...
"You want it?" I asked the guy point blank.
"You're kidding, right?" He sounded genuinely surprised.
"No." I looked over at Tom. "This r
etar... this girl down the block couldn't take care of it, and we were taking it to—"
The light changed to the amber right turn arrow.
"Pull over there," Tom pointed to a lot behind the Kimball Avenue Bowling Alley. Man, this was so long ago! It seemed so easy, almost coincidental.
After a few simple pleasantries were exchanged, not a one of us gaining any enlightenment, Seskar — first name Vince, I vaguely recall — drove off with Girly-Girl in the front seat, buckled in. It was a surreal image.
Tom and I looked at each other. By the old radial clock above the bowling alley entrance, we saw that barely ten minutes had passed. No one would believe that we'd have driven all the way to Albany Park, signed over the paperwork, and made it back for a summer rerun of The Rockford Files. No, they would have thought that we would have left it abandoned at some off-ramp near I-94.
The legend above the clock encouraged that it was TIME TO BOWL! We weren't particularly up to it, so we drove down Kimball to look at the impounded cars, then topped it off with Milk Shake Monsters at the Tastee-Freez.
We drove back home, thinking about the way Seskar had been smiling and all; we felt pretty good. We were also relieved because it had cooled off a bit and Toni had a couple of cans of Green River in a cooler in the back seat.
Audrey was at the curb in front of my parents' house.
We'd been hoping, even though the news was good, that Audrey would have been home in bed, or at least in the living room watching Mery Griffin. She had a shitload of questions as soon as we mentioned our success. We lied only once; saying that Seskar showed up at the front desk just as were coming in.
Even my Ma seemed to go along with that. Of course, she really couldn't care less. She just wanted to stay in good with the Gazarras because Audrey's father cut costs on our utility bill.
Audrey was filled with absolute glee. What did the father do for a living? My mind clicking back though vanilla-induced lightheadedness, I told her that the father was a carpenter. He fixed people's houses up. Tom was quick to jump in with further explanation.
"Did he have a big family?" she asked, clapping her bony hands. A daughter, we said simultaneously. And then we were shut of it.
Audrey went back home. As a belated reprimand — certainly not a punishment, she was not allowed out at night, not just from hanging around the Tapped Out, but she couldn't even go to the new McDonald's. 7 billion served, remember when?
This didn't last for long, considering her parents' respective priorities to others. Mr. Gazarra still had his affair and Audrey's mother found more reasons to stay by the neighbors. Sometimes I wondered if the neighbors had last names like Walker, Beam, and Daniels.
Tom and I split up once the difference in our ages affected where and who we dated. Tom got a job as an apprentice during the firefighter's strike in 1980. I hardly ever saw him after that.
I moved to Fallon Ridge for a few years, working as a doorman at The Touch, as well as a few other places down Sin Strip. I don't have the meat of a football player on me, but you don't need it in a town of anorexic juicers. But I do have the meat where it counts, if you anticipate my thrust. And Audrey Gazarra did have a crush on me, in those days when men's lapels looked like hang gliders.
After my folks both died, I found myself back in the old 'hood for a summer and part of autumn, taking care of showing the place around. Acting like Mister Real Estate Man. In truth, I didn't give a shit about the place. Hell if I were going to live there; bunch of Ricans hating the Koreans hating the blacks.
Tom's parents had bought a condo out in Tinley Park. Much of the block we grew up on was burned down, a hard thing to accomplish in an area that was not row houses or railroad apartments. There was blight everywhere.
Surprisingly, the Gazarras still lived on the block, their place and the Bridal Boutique were the only landmarks I recognized. Even the Tapped Out had evolved into the Club Acapulco. The Gazarras were still there and Audrey was pregnant again. I wondered if the kid would look Hispanic when it was born.
Without my Ma around to do the dirty work, it was up to Mrs. Gazarra to ask me if I could take care of the baby, like I did fifteen years ago with Girly-Girl.
I had a few people in mind, mostly through my contacts at The Touch. A friend of a friend wanted to adopt. A friend of a friend of a friend wanted stunt babies for snuff films.
The money offered for the former was much less, but it was up to me to decide.
Audrey was going to call the new one Nummie-Nums, she told me. I took her aside, and asked her if, when Nummie-Nums was born, she might like to do it with me.
Have another baby.
She hardly remembered having the first baby, couldn't remember Tom Wolniak's name. I figured that she could have a few more kids.
It was easy to coerce Audrey into taking her clothes off. She was flat-chested, her nipples like pepperonis. When I saw how she laid flat on the cement in her garage, and knew what her pussy and my cock was, I thought that maybe she had learned a lot from the factory workers. I saw the whole thing as a lucrative operation, maybe even taking a jump on selling to the snuff films.
The Gazarras would end up blaming her pregnancies on the dumb polacks wearing work clothes with the logo "Ask Me about Aloe" written in lime-green on the back. The whole thing seemed way past easy for me.
Until I got the letter from Mercedes McBride. AKA Girly-Girl, all grown up and full of stories about the nice family who had adopted her, the father who eventually raped her at the age of nine, the mother who was nonexistent from the start, the girlfriend who took all the photos while Daddy-Boyfriend did the nasty thing all through Girly-Girl's teens. She's old enough to be working at a titty bar by the river, The ToyHouse.
Sent me a picture of herself. A promo shot of sorts, not the ones taken by her adoptive parents with a Polaroid Land Camera while she was being graduated into the real world. Now at the strip bar, she wrote, she wears a cat suit and dances on a stage while all kinds of degenerate men suck on their lower lips while they watch her peel the outfit off to songs by Aerosmith and Widows of Whitechapel and call her all kind of names that sound just like Girly-Girl and Nummie-Nums and Kookie-Face.
Kookie-Face was what Audrey Gazarra was going to name her third baby. She was in her second trimester when the photo from Mercedes showed up in my lock box at the Loop Station post office.
The glittery black outfit was peeled down to her waist, the way a person being prepped for a whipping might look. Her face was definitely feral, yet tranquil and beatific at the same time. Her hair was cut surprisingly short, a flying brunette wedge that in profile might have given the impression of a tiny pointed cat ear.
Her breasts were fully exposed. Small and shaped like creamy sno-cones, they were a far cry from her mother's body. A far cry from the way I recalled them looking as Audrey had dressed her for that last trip with me and Tom standing by solemnly. Her breasts were not as large as those of the girls who worked The Touch. Fallon Ridge is in Lyons Township and has less strict obscenity laws. Because they serve liquor at The ToyHouse, Chicago restricts the place from allowing frontal nudity, including nipple shots.
The women lather up with flesh-colored latex, making their bodies look as if they were the brainless Barbies the men expected them to be. Her pale breasts in the black and white photo didn't look sexless or like something from out of The Stepford Wives, they looked ready for suckling.
The photo was signed You made me, Mercedes.
The letter told that she knew how to get to me, that she knew where I lived. I suppose that the same group of people with the same set of low morals work Cook County like they do Lyons Township. Maybe it was one of my friends of a friend of a friend. I don't know if she plans on eventually extorting money from me, or if she has to call in a marker with one of my friends of a friend, etc.
She signed the letter Girly-Girl, so I know she found out about that in some way. Again, the people we know.
But I lay awake thinking I hear
her corning up on padded feet because of something in the photo. The cat suit had a zipper at the crotch. The picture isn't blurred or anything, but it is difficult to see if Girly-Girl, if Mercedes is exposing her pussy. That's the thing that does it, see. The casual way a cat might lay, not caring what you see. Maybe stretching, arching its spine, opening its legs wider still if you scratch it and call it names. Like Nummie-Nums and Kookie-Face.
Or Girly-Girl.
Chicago:
19 July 1994
The Pink Twist Inn
The bloated ghost wasn't mentioned in the Tribune until March, I had been following him around at least a month before that. He hadn't solidified enough to me to warn him. About what was going to happen to him. Once they caught up with him.
The dead look after their own, saints and sinners alike.
His crime was more despicable than mine by far, so they would be on to him much quicker. See, even in death, you can't escape justice. The kind that should have been meted out, what some call jungle justice and others call mercy killing.
Richard Speck escaped the electric chair when the Supreme Court overruled such decrees in the early seventies. He still got life in prison, but died having served only twenty-five years at Stateville. Emphysema, clogged arteries, chain-smoking; Speck died of a heart attack the day before he'd have turned fifty.
I knew it was him because of what he was trying to find.
The Pink Twist Inn.
The dive he spent time drinking and brawling in the night after he raped and killed those eight nurses up near Calumet.
I knew it when it never had a name, back in the days before prohibition, bind pigs, and speakeasies. Things keep changing in Chicago. After Speck went to Joliet, the neighborhood went from skid row to grab-bag gay town. Now, The Pink Twist is gone.
What remains is the parking lot for the Rock 'N Roll McDonalds.
But the bloated ghost still stumbles around, searching. Knowing goddamn well that he's dead. They all know O'Connor died of natural causes a few months after the escaped the makeshift jail. Drank himself to death on Madison Street. The executioner was waiting for him. There was only one executioner in those days.