Bad Reputation: The Complete Collection

by Matt Hader

  Keith Michaels used the “Baby Face Robber’s” funds to purchase the property. Well, he didn’t know it was the “Baby Face Robber’s” money, but he took it anyway. He also used funds from his and his wife’s own savings account, and the $50,000 he received from a 52-year-old Oak Park man named Franky “Five Bucks.”

  Franky “Five Bucks” was raised in the Little Italy neighborhood on Chicago’s Near West Side. Franky, born Frederik Gregers, the son of an immigrant fish monger, stood out like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed sore thumb in the predominantly Italian American area. His choppy Danish accent, which was now mixed with a distinctive Chicago intonation, didn’t help his cause at first, either.

  His father, Jorgen, had an incredible eye for quality seafood, and a penchant for negotiating the best prices from wholesalers. Because he consistently stocked the best seafood at the lowest prices, Jorgen Gregers was widely welcomed into the Italian neighborhood.

  Young Frederik soon learned that to fit into the dog-eat-dog West Side neighborhood, he needed an edge over some of the other, much stronger and fearless, area dwellers of his age group. He smartly decided to use his intelligence to get ahead in the world. As a young teenager, and like most of the other kids his age, he lacked the brawn needed to make a name for himself, though. Using a gun wasn’t his style, either. But he would soon be able to hire the muscle to get his way.

  Like his old man, Frederik had a knack for negotiating. His deals, though, usually revolved around the buying and/or selling of something, really anything, for $5. Whether it be the ten dozen donuts he snatched from the unattended back door of a bakery, or the blow job he procured from a local whore, $5 was the usual end point to the then 14-year-old Frederik’s business dealings.

  Everyone in Frederik’s area of Chicago had a nickname. He was a huge Sinatra fan so soon enough Frederik Gregers became Franky “Five Bucks.” Normally the others in the neighborhood would provide the cool, and sometimes not-so-cool, nicknames for the various inhabitants. Frederik caused a minor, but not long-lasting stir by supplying his own moniker.

  A home inspector and poker playing buddy of Keith’s introduced him to Franky “Five Bucks.” At first Keith appreciated Franky “Five Bucks” seemingly jovial nature. He was quite the jokester. For a loan shark/bookie, he was okay. After Keith discussed his need for funding and the sweet deal he had gotten on the Randall Road property, Franky “Five Bucks” wanted in. He’d loan Keith Michael’s $50,000 and get back $150,000 for his troubles.

  The $100,000 Keith was paying for the two-acre parcel was a steal. Keith could not believe his luck in locating the deal.

  The current owner of the property was an 87-year-old farmer named Len Cramer. Cramer had lived on the property for years, and grew corn there up until his knees went out and he couldn’t continue working. That was last year.

  When the Randall Road building craze began, he started selling off parcels of his 300-acre farm. The two acres that Keith purchased were the last bits of land that Len owned, and it was where his 100-year-old farm house was located, which was currently positioned next to the loading dock of a Bed Bath & Beyond.

  The going rate of an acre was nearly one million in the Randall Road area. Keith felt like he was taking advantage of the old man, but needed to make this deal to show the world, and mostly his father-in-law, that he was not a complete putz.

  There were two major problems with Keith’s plan, though. One was that his wife wasn’t aware of the missing money from their joint savings account – money that was given to her by her parents. And two, the land he purchased was incorrectly zoned as commercial. He was given that tidbit of information just two days after he closed on the property when a McHenry County zoning official caught up to him at his Balmoral real estate office. They were the real estate offices that were owned by his wife and her parents.

  The McHenry County zoning official didn’t enjoy telling Keith how the former zoning official, a man he had taken over for a week before, had been on the take. He was mislabeling several of the parcels in the Randall Road area as “commercial” and taking bribes from the current landowners, so they could rope in rubes like Keith.

  That little, old man, Len Cramer, had screwed Keith Michaels over and was now enjoying himself and his brand-new, 42-year-old girlfriend, in the condo he purchased on Marco Island, Florida.

  So the acreage purchased was adjacent to, but could never become part of, the huge shopping district that lined both sides of the wide boulevard known as Randall Road. There was a third problem, as well. The economy tanked three weeks after the money was turned over, and the land became his.

  Keith Michaels was the proud owner of two acres of barely usable land, and $100,000 in the hole, to boot. $50,000 of that debt was now owed to the formerly jovial Franky “Five Bucks.” And Franky still wanted the additional $100,000 that was negotiated in the initial deal. A deal was a deal.

  ***

  If you had asked John a year before if he’d ever do something like rob businesses in neighboring municipalities so he could save his own town’s famous Fourth of July celebration, he would have laughed. But something happened when the economy turned and his town hit a financial rough patch.

  People became even crueler and began openly taking their frustrations out on him at an accelerated pace. He was an easy target because everyone knew that the only reason he volunteered in the first place was due to his guilt over accidentally burning down the high school gym.

  Even the cashiers at the Gemstone Grocery Store on Main Street would display their “out of service” placards when they saw him rolling his packed shopping cart their way. John became a whiz at the self-checkout lane, faster than the cashiers who ignored him.

  The thoughts of past confrontations in town looped endlessly in John’s mind. He could see and hear the townsfolk yelling at him from across the expanse of a grocery store or the street. The agitators never really got right up into his face, though. They were brutal but usually from a distance.

  And the eggings got worse.

  A few times a month, John would wake to thumping sounds at the front of his house late at night. He knew exactly what the thumps were, but never got out of bed. In the morning, he’d wake to the sight of splattered eggs on the windows, the front walls, and the sidewalk leading up to his tiny porch. No matter the weather, someone got it in their head to egg his house. Even on Christmas.

  At first he tried scraping, cleaning, and sometimes repainting the tougher egg stains, but not any longer. His house wore the stains like proud battle scars. That made his property stand out all the more - where teardowns replaced by McMansions was the norm, and the tiny, post-war frame houses like John’s, were the anomaly.

  The dried eggs made John’s house appear as if it was a guano-covered rock in the middle of a tree lined, suburban paradise.

  His dwelling may have looked like hell, but the neighbors had stopped complaining years ago because John refused to bow to their demands. No village fine would change him from not painting or repairing his home. And now, even the neighbors would ignore John whenever they saw him outside his home. It was as if he didn’t even exist – and that was fine with him.

  In the early 1980’s, before the teardown/rebuild craze began, John was the cock of the roost in his neighborhood. He was an excellent athlete, outgoing, and a leader among the other neighborhood kids, even at the tender age of 11.

  He was a nice kid, but other youngsters in the neighborhood who ever attempted to embarrass or challenge him learned quickly that John could fight if backed into a corner. He would make quick work of any foolish, neighborhood bullies who crossed the line with him.

  John and his best friend, Rob, already a contrarian by nature, for all of his ten or so years on earth, were inseparable. Rob never shied away from mouthing off to any elder who tried to slide any sort of wisdom or advice his way. R
ob contradicted first; asked questions, never. He already thought that he knew it all.

  John and Rob got into some trouble from time to time. Like when they were caught clipping the hood ornament off a brand-new Mercedes Benz that was parked on their block. Or the time they crafted a persnickety neighbor’s vine-covered trellis into an aluminum pretzel after the neighbor kept a football of theirs that had been inadvertently tossed into his yard.

  John and Rob received the punishment they deserved each time they messed up - usually a crack across the back of the head for Rob from his old man, and for John, a long freeze-out by his disapproving mother, Mary.

  John’s mom never laid a hand on him or his older brother. It wasn’t that she didn’t discipline the boys. She simply had a different approach than some of the other parents in the neighborhood.

  Here’s how the punishment usually played out. First, the offender was banished to the plastic-covered, living room sofa for most of the day without any television privileges. There they would have to watch as their mother went about her daily chores all the while being totally ignored by her.

  The perp suffered from torture by boredom. It was an effective deterrent for kid crime.

  And it got worse.

  At the dinner table, John’s mother would sport what John and his brother would call “the look.” It wasn’t a scary expression, just that well-worn, dour and disapproving face only a mother can exact on a child. The look was usually accompanied by her withholding any further attention toward the offender for a length of time, usually a day or so.

  John’s dad, on the other hand, was a comic-wannabe.

  Bernie Caul would try to diffuse any difficult situation with a sophomoric joke and a dopey grin. John had no respect for him or the idiotic and corresponding to the “kid crime,” knock-knock jokes he improvised. It usually just made the situations worse.

  “Knock-knock.”

  John would reluctantly play along, “Who’s there?”

  “Don Cha.”

  “Don Cha, who?”

  “Don Cha you do the crime if you can’t do the time, Sport.”

  John hated his dad.

  He often fantasized about having Rob’s parents for his own. At least they paid attention to the contrarian Rob by cracking him across the back of the head when he messed up. But with Rob, that was it. The punishment was dispensed, and the situation was over. He could go about his carefree, kid day.

  At John’s house, alternatively, there was silence from his mother on one side, and from the other, his dad, who everyone called “Shecky,” spewing inane jokes. It all equated to the waterboarding of an 11-year-old kid in 1980’s Balmoral.

  The one and only thing that truly brought his family together each and every year, was the fabulous Balmoral Fourth of July Festival.

  For the entire week that the event lasted his mother and father were sincerely interested in what John and his older brother were doing. It could have been because both his parents had been raised in the town and were trying to recapture a bit of their own carefree youth, but John wasn’t sure.

  He chose never to question the good feelings that washed over their tiny home on Coleridge Avenue when Fourth of July rolled around each summer. He was always glad for the festival’s arrival.

  Groundbreaking on the first McMansion in his neighborhood took place the week after John’s mother’s funeral. It was the summer that he turned 13. Rob and his family moved out of the area soon after, wanting to take advantage of the money being paid for their highly sought after building lots.

  Right after his mother’s passing, John had gone “Goth.” He fell into the Goth line by wearing black clothing, died jet-black hair, black fingernail polish - the whole “dark arts” getup.

  Life after his mother’s death and Rob’s departure became as dim as his wardrobe. Little by little, the carefree existence of youth was draining from him.

  That joyless way of life accelerated after he learned that his friend, Rob, had been killed. He had stolen a canoe from a home along the Des Plaines River, fell out of the boat, and drowned after getting caught in the powerful undertow of a low-water dam.

  At his high school, John was a total outcast. He would stand out like a shadow man among the bright clothing and toothy smiles of the well-to-do Balmoral youth.

  Although they tried at first, any possible bully that John encountered was swiftly repelled by his bursts of aggression and his fast fists. He wound up losing a lot of fights, though, due to the fact that he was usually outnumbered. The brave bullies at Balmoral High School seemed to only run in packs back in John’s day.

  While working behind the scenes as a stagehand on the high school’s version of “No, No, Nannette,” John made a fateful error.

  The theater department had used the large, gymnasium floor to stretch out the 200-foot-long stage lighting system for testing. John’s stagehand job was also being performed in the gym. He was to unfurl and paint the flammable, cotton material used to recreate stage clouds.

  In a tragic case of “you got peanut butter on my chocolate/you got chocolate on my peanut butter,” the cotton material was placed too close to the hot stage lights. The gym took only an hour to burn to the ground, and his nickname “Sparky” was born.

  John’s dad, Bernie, took his last breath ten years after his mother died, dropping face first in the patchy weeds of the backyard while prepping the Weber cooker for a lonely, July evening cookout.

  John’s older brother was long gone by that time, now living in the neighboring town of Crystal Lake and wanting nothing more to do with John or the house he grew up in.

  John always tried pushing thoughts of his family away, but they always circled back. They were unavoidable. John didn’t like admitting to it these days, but he desperately missed the family members he tried to avoid in his youth.

  CHAPTER 3

  John, on his riding mower, made the final turn for his last swath of tall grass, completed the job and rolled away, passing by a large monument placed in front of the beautiful, recreation building at the park.

  On the monument there was a plaque with the inscription: “At this site on November 27, 1934, FBI Inspector Samuel C. Frowley and Special Agent Herbert G. Collins, both of the Chicago FBI office, attempted to apprehend then Public Enemy #1 “Baby Face” Nelson. A running gun battle ensued along Illinois Highway 14, which ended near the entrance to North Side Park. Both Inspector Frowley and Special Agent Collins were mortally wounded, as was Nelson.”

  John had stood in front of that plaque many times, reading and looking out at the park-scape. The modern recreation building (complete with an indoor pool) to one side, the octopus-like, tubular slides of the new water park to the other and a McDonald’s positioned at the entrance off of Route 14.

  He imagined what the place had looked like that November day back in 1934 when “Baby Face” Nelson took his last breath. He tried and tried to envision the blowing snow covering the expanse of frozen grass, bare trees and a gray, low-cloud ceiling of a 1934 Balmoral. But it never came to him.

  It was, however, the place where he decided to wear the see-through, plastic, baby face mask for his side job. It was his darkly comedic homage to the murderer mentioned on the plaque.

  John would often wonder if other Goth kids had grown up to view the world as he did, through jaundiced eyes. Or maybe they’d sold out and joined the rest of the world, chasing the joys of McMansion ownership. He thought to himself, “I’m a Goth - all grown up,” and smiled.

  As he made his way toward the McDonald’s, he saw a flash of violent activity out of the corner of his eye. The smartass teenager, a kid John knew as Staley, who had just called him Sparky, was throwing punches at a smaller boy about 15. The boy, Danny, wearing shabby clothing, was doing his best to deflect the blows. But the smartass Staley was bigger and
stronger and Danny was taking some real punishment.

  John didn’t exactly tackle Staley, but the forearm shiver he applied knocked the larger teen to the ground. When he scrambled to his feet ready to fight, he was shocked to see that it was John who had supplied the quick jab.

  “Back off, Sparky. This is between me and that asshole.”

  John turned to Danny and asked, “Are you okay?”

  Danny backed away, wiping blood from his nose and said, “Screw both of you.”

  “Not cool, Sparky. Not cool at all, man.”

  John gave “the look,” and Staley smartly exited toward the town’s center.

  John got back on his mower, made a turn toward following Danny, but stopped. He didn’t need any undo notice on him now, especially with his robbery scheme working out so well. John watched as Danny made his way toward the tree line and disappeared from view.

  This wasn’t the first time that John had noticed Danny. He’d seen him before, usually lurking around the edges of the park, strolling or sitting alone, and looking troubled. Danny wasn’t a Goth kid like John once was. He didn’t deck himself out in the dark attire, but he looked raggedy as if living on the streets.

  John, of all people, knew the signs of a teen in need of help, and Danny fit the bill. Even in the upscale area where John lived, there were still a few families in need.

  A couple of times in the past, he had thought about stopping his mower and introducing himself to the 15-year-old kid, but he always pulled up short of actually doing that.

  “He’d think I was a perv, or something,” John thought to himself.

  The car horn startled him from his daydream.

  John took in a sharp breath as one of Balmoral’s finest, Officer Jimmy, a no-nonsense cop, slowly rolled up in his black and white police cruiser, giving John a suspicious once-over.