Start Shooting

by Charlie Newton

  “Don’ think so.”

  “You don’t, huh? Why don’t we go find him now? I shoot the spic right in front of you. Make you boss.”

  Little Paul looks away.

  I shove him backward. “Why do I keep trying to be your friend? Maybe you’re just too stupid to save.”

  He throws me the KK again.

  “Get the fuck outta here. Tell big bad Danny I got his dope.” I draw my SIG and show Little Paul the barrel. “Right inside there is where I got it. And tell him Bobby Vargas don’t have to hide in his own neighborhood.”

  Little Paul marshals his peewee-gangster dignity and slowly walks away to explain how he lost fourteen bags of rock. Later today I’ll make a pass on Jourdan Court so Danny Vacco knows it wasn’t bullshit. Even seven-year-olds don’t live long if they steal from the gang.

  Back in the car I consider today’s Herald on the seat. The headline above the fold is Furukawa Industries and their billion-dollar support of Chicago’s Olympic rebid. We get the Olympics, money flows in from everywhere; Chicago’s budget is in the black for the next five years; developers make a ton of money; and a whole bunch of ghetto along the lakefront and ghetto gangsters are pushed out of the city.

  Beneath the fold the news isn’t so good. Part one of an “exposé” written by Tracy Moens, Chicago’s star crime reporter. My name is prominent, as is Coleen Brennan’s, and so is the Four Corners’ troubled history—special problems like rape, cop killings, cop reprisals, and dead little girls. History that’s better for everyone if it stays buried with the victims and families … but won’t as long as there’s money to be made and old scores to be settled. And a big-city newspaper on life support.

  I knew Coleen Brennan and her twin sister, Arleen—not to play with; when I was a kid you didn’t play with the white girls, especially the Irish—but by the time we were six Coleen and I had become real friends just the same. The last time I saw Coleen she was in an alley between here and Greektown before Greektown was six-digit condos and coffee cost five dollars. They found her lying faceup, crumpled in the trash, a mitten on one hand, a torn school-uniform blouse, and nothing else. February had frozen her fast, the screams still in her eyes. At the time, and maybe still, it was the scariest, saddest thing I’d ever seen. She and I were thirteen. February 3rd, year of our Lord 1982.

  Year of our Lord—no way the God most people worship is real, not with the shit He allows. That said, I’ll grant the preachers and faith healers that something powerful is out here festering in the dark, whatever it is. If you’re a cop you can’t help but believe in evil—not after a career of gag-reflex basements, eighty-year-old rape victims, full-auto drive-bys … every now and then a Mulwray (from the movie Chinatown, our name for a father-daughter; some stuff you have to rename).

  The 12th District cops caught Coleen’s killers and the state tried them—death sentence for the older one; triple life for the other because he only confessed to raping her. The killers were from Stateway Gardens, the projects by Thirty-fifth on the other side of the Dan Ryan, black teenagers who said they were in our neighborhood to see relatives who’d just moved in. It was the fearful era of white flight and the integration strategy of blockbusting and solid footholds. A week after the Herald printed the relatives’ part in the boys’ confession, the relatives’ apartment burned to the foundation. Took the Irish firemen an hour to get their hoses right. But the blacks kept coming and their gangs came with them.

  Coleen’s twin sister, Arleen, stayed at St. Dom’s but no one outside the school ever saw her other than a uniform cop who’d walk her both ways and a Child Services worker (shrink) who visited twice a week. Coleen’s mom waitressed across the river in Bridgeport, tried to hold it together because she had Arleen to raise, but as it turned out Mrs. Brennan had only a year to live herself. After Coleen’s murder, the father became a neighborhood fixture even the non-Irish cops left alone, a mean hair-trigger longshoreman who drank on the Brennans’ stoop till the wife died and the surviving twin ran off a day later—fourteen years old and she didn’t even stay for her mother’s funeral—says something about that household. The father eventually disappeared into Canaryville or some other private hell. I never set foot on Coleen’s block again. And prior to Coleen’s father leaving, no black people did, either.

  Life went on in the Four Corners. Harold Washington out-campaigned Mayor Daley’s son and became the new mayor. Race and poverty and new urbanism dominated the city’s agenda, but back then the state of Illinois could still kill somebody for raping a little girl to death. Anton Dupree, the black teenager they executed, was thirty-seven when he finally died at Stateville; the other perp died in his cell—thirty-seven stab wounds to the neck, face, and chest. Anton talked a lot in the six months before the state killed him, pointed his finger everywhere except the mirror. By then I was on the job five years, got the chance to attend the execution in place of my commander, sat second row and smiled at Anton when they walked him in, but I don’t think he saw me—the state offers the condemned inmate tranquilizers ahead of time and Anton had accepted. Anton had a minister with him as well, a denomination-of-one preacher from Seventy-ninth Street who was sure this was a white conspiracy. The assistant state’s attorney sitting next to me said they should execute the preacher, too, call it efficient governance.

  I was twenty-six on that very day and surprised that I didn’t feel any better when Anton died. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in capital punishment—sure, doing it quicker would make it more of a deterrent; and making state-paid DNA mandatory would level the field for the guys who can’t afford O.J.’s lawyers—but in the end, humans convicted of first-degree murder need to vacate the gene pool. And street cops can’t shoot them anymore.

  So, why the Chicago Herald’s sudden interest in digging up the distant past? For one thing, it turns out Anton Dupree probably didn’t kill Coleen Brennan. I’m not saying Anton Dupree was an angel but it turns out he was retarded, “not operating with a clear understanding of his situation” when he gave and signed his confession. His public defenders say they didn’t know; the ASA who prosecuted him three times says she didn’t know; and I didn’t know … or don’t think I did.

  But two of my fellow officers knew, one of whom was my older brother, Ruben. At least that’s what the lawyers for Anton’s family are saying. Wrongful death—$8.9 million from the city of Chicago; same from all four of the cops who worked the case, like cops have that kind of money. Hell, my brother didn’t come on the job until the first trial was almost over.

  Should the cops who worked the case have known Anton was retarded, possibly innocent? That’s kind of the problem. On TV the hero cop bucks the system—takes on the role of the ASA, the judge, the jury, overrides the Constitution, does the right thing, and saves the accused as well as the American justice system from a tragic mistake. America can tuck the kids in, pet the dog, and go to bed knowing our system works—and when it doesn’t, heroes (insert movie-star name here) will fill in the gaps.

  Try that shit in Chicago and you’d be fired, your pension toast, followed by a short or long prison term depending on the public mood, and named in a civil suit to take whatever money or valuables your defense lawyers didn’t. Why? Because someone would be positive you got it wrong. And some race, creed, or gender constituency would agree. There would be tabloid media and mainstream media, radio shock jocks, preachers, aspiring politicians, and law firms atop proud white horses. Time it just right and there’d be parades.

  So cops stay within the system. Or you cheat carefully. And when you cheat for what you think are the right reasons, they say you’re the devil. And when you don’t cheat, they say you’re a coward. And you’re both, all the time, for a starting salary of $45K and the chance to die in a dark hallway for people you don’t know.

  My pager goes off, and I throw the newspaper aside. Time to go to work, meet friends for a gunfight that has nothing to do with Coleen Brennan’s murder but everything to do with this neigh
borhood. I spend a last few seconds with her building, her window. So why won’t I shut up about her? Let it go?

  Two reasons: First, Coleen was nice to me—it was our secret. Started when we were six. We went to different schools, but our windows faced each other across the alley. She was white and back then I wasn’t, and both mattered a great deal to me. Coleen was also my first real true and honest friend. Dangerous for us both because the Four Corners had race rules written in blood. Coleen and I weren’t allowed to look at each other, let alone talk, or God forbid, touch, so we conjured a plan.

  We’d sit in our windows every afternoon reading each other’s books. She’d leave me one behind her trash can and I’d exchange it with one I’d get from our library on Loomis Street. By sixth grade, we decided we were officially boyfriend-girlfriend. I wrote songs about her. Coleen was the only Irish girl whose hand I ever held. By eighth grade, I was so in love with her and who we would become, that I didn’t stop carrying a picture of us until I was twenty-five. Had it with me, soft in my hand, the day Anton Dupree quit breathing.

  Reason number two is the Chicago Herald’s exposé: “MONSTER: The Murder of Coleen Brennan.” Part one implies that in the days to come they will prove that my brother Ruben and I were the two boys who actually killed her.

  She was alone because all little girls are alone on that day. Alone with a man—it’s almost always a man, middle-aged, white—alone with the man who entices her into a car, a doorway, a vacant lot; a man who uses her in ways a civilized person can’t quite fathom, can’t quite add to their visual vocabulary.

  —“MONSTER,” by Tracy Moens; © 2011 Chicago Herald

  ARLEEN CRISTA BRENNAN, ACTRESS

  FRIDAY, 10:30 AM

  Big grin for my bus stop: population six, a rainbow nation of very diverse hopes and dreams, all waiting for the Division Street Super-Shadow. Thirty seats scented with urine, vomit, summer sweat, and industrial disinfectant—the daily life cycle that cauterizes public transportation and keeps our fares down. Artie, our bus driver, calls us the United Colors of Benetton (I’d go with the Funkadelics) and says we’re his favorite stop. Well, duh.

  Six days a week we arrive here packaged from small closets and kitchens, semi-ready to meet another workday in our city, the Second City, the City of Big Shoulders. And just maybe the Olympic City, if the festival banners rehung along Division Street are right this time.

  Horn toot, the 7-0 looms big and silver and pushes a slow-moving Pontiac forward. The bus door pops open and six Funkadelics bound up the steps. Artie smiles. I smile back. Today’s my first day being me again.

  It’s not like I haven’t been here before, but first days are always difficult. They’re the final exit from intricate, intensely constructed fantasy back into an all too often blighted reality. Sound strange? It is, like coming down from a ferociously colorful LSD landscape to grayscale, soundless dust bowl; or a massive weekend romance with champagne and room service that leaves you flushed and tingly, but somehow emptier, some part of you lost in the exchange. And here’s the kicker—you make this journey on purpose, with every ounce of your being, as often as they’ll let you. And as often as your sanity can take it.

  That’s what it’s like to audition, if being an actress is why you’re alive. And 99 percent of the time the payoff is “Thank you for coming.”

  To do this well, it helps to be desperate or crazy, or both.

  For the two weeks leading up to last Wednesday’s audition, I slowly became Southern belle Blanche DuBois, meticulously purging any sense of “me” with yoga, intense meditation, and finally the deep-core exercises of Lee Strasberg that bring the tears and vomit. I’ve not had children, nor do I live in the third world where those children die young, but the process has similarities—death first, as the original you fades away; then new life, only to see your new identity, your creation, wither and die.

  Our driver palms his cap, nodding as he accepts the paper bag I offer. He grins at the baked-apple-and-nutmeg aroma, follows my eyes to the Pontiac I’m watching drive away, then back. “Mighty nice of ya, Arleen. Mighty nice.” His salt-and-pepper stubble hasn’t changed in the two years I’ve been riding the Super-Shadow.

  “Show business loves ya, Artie.” No doubt, I’m the only passenger who brings him Belfast crumble muffins. Better his waistline than mine; each one of those nutty little monsters is thirty-seven minutes on the StairMaster. I bake them for luck. Not that they work all that often, but my ma said when you gave crumble muffins away it was buildin’ a foundation in Heaven. She was a waitress, too, but over in Bridgeport.

  Actually, I should say I’m “an actress who waits tables.” At “thirty-nine” waitressing is one of the elemental ways you know you’re an actress. The other is to learn every bit of craft and art anyone will teach you, prepare for every opportunity like it’s your last, and, finally, pour your heart and soul into the auditions that all seem to end with “Thank you for coming,” then do more auditions, then do some more if you can get them. Pay the price; take every part they offer and play it to the walls. And when you’re finally in the running for Blanche DuBois, for a real part that might be the break you’ve earned, and you have a feeling that you might honestly have a chance—the casting director said something or his eyes did, something—then, and only then, do you bake Belfast crumble muffins.

  My stop is State Parkway and Division. At the newsstand in front of P. J. Clarke’s, I sneak a Chicago Tribune off the stacks surrounding the Herald and its tabloid headlines. In a month or two, the Herald will likely join America’s newsprint graveyard. Where it belongs. Barney, the blind kid with the change bag says, “Hey, Cincinnati.”

  He means The Cincinnati Kid, the movie with Steve McQueen and Tuesday Weld. My middle name is Crista but “Cincinnati” has been my nickname since my twenties; a fellow hopeful at the Actors Studio in L.A. thought I resembled Tuesday Weld … if you squinted and it was dark. He’s dead now, an OD after a final “Thank you for coming.”

  “We pitchin’, Cincinnati?” Barney flashes a quarter between two black fingertips.

  “I never win. Why don’t I just pay double?”

  “Could do that. Get me some actin’ classes, too.”

  I put a dollar in his palm. “That’s my lunch money, Barn. Trust me, only one of us has to wait tables; you’re Broadway ready.”

  FRIDAY, 11:00 AM

  Showtime in ten minutes. Apron on, ponytail just right. Chest out, lipstick … man, I can wear some lipstick. Tuesday Weld at “thirty-nine.”

  Sniffle. Sniffle.

  Suzie. Poor thing; twentysomething, life ruined, and all she has is me. And I don’t know one lullaby for girls already wearing long pants and makeup. In the Four Corners an Irish lass had to harden up a bit by then, hide what troubled her. And I’m not much of a singer anyway—dancer, forget about it, tiptoe you right off the floor—but singer, not so much.

  Suzie shrinks deeper into her very attractive shoulders.

  I lift. “C’mon, sweetie, let’s get you some eyeliner.”

  Suzie continues to sniffle rather than participate in her reconstruction and a lunch rush that starts in eight minutes. She and I are two of nine waitresses at Hugo’s on Rush Street, the North Side’s one block of leafy boulevard de Montmartre. I hug Suzie’s shoulder and lift—

  Nope, she’d prefer to sniffle rather than prep her tables. Our manager notices and rolls his eyes—most of us are actors or actresses, so drama is occasionally on sale here, especially when we were sure we had the part. Today I have a right to a bit of drama, given the teaser exposé headline below the fold in today’s Herald, but I’m not going there. No one in Hugo’s knows I’m Coleen Brennan’s twin sister. In the two years I’ve been back I haven’t been near the Four Corners; that life happened to someone else.

  I have spoken to two people who know me. One cop, and now one reporter from the Herald. Each time the Herald has asked for my cooperation, I’ve refused. And I won’t read the article today, written
by strangers about a beautiful girl they didn’t know. Twenty-nine years ago I watched strangers bury Coleen, a part of me lost in the ether but not gone. A year later my ma died, and I ran … from my father and the Four Corners … all the way to Hollywood; was all of fourteen when I arrived. Axl Rose sang about it in “Welcome to the Jungle”—all the drama a scared Irish girl could stand.

  I smile “sorry” at my manager, then tell Suzie, “Honey, Kylie Minogue couldn’t wear the back of those pants any better; from the front you’re Miss Teen USA; you’ll work again, even if it’s porn loops.”

  Suzie doesn’t laugh, although it’s true. She has talent and looks and youth, and she will work again—here, New York, or L.A. if she doesn’t quit or self-destruct, self-destruction being a prime career hazard that claims as many of us as service revolvers do Chicago policemen. Window check—I know two Chicago policemen, and not in a good way, but like that Pontiac that spooked me this morning, both are part of another story.

  “C’mon, we’ll buy you some blow after work, you can saddle up a cowboy or five.”

  Suzie smiles perfect pouty lips and forces herself to her feet. She straightens an apron that will make four or five men risk their families before lunch is over … and sniffles. Suzie will work again. And like one, maybe even two of us in here with stacks of dog-eared scripts in our bedrooms, the kitchen Peg-board of wrap-party photos from the shows we got, and address books full of “contacts” from those shows we didn’t get, lightning will strike—I’ve seen it, been so close I thought it was finally my turn—the stage lights will hit and we’ll be whole.

  Whole because beyond the stage lights and adulation, we’ll be welcomed backstage into a new family, a joyous and dysfunctional troupe of drama queens and crew, for birthdays and doctor days, for new boyfriends and teary breakups, marriages and graduations, all the sinew and gristle that binds hearts to souls forever and ever. But only if we don’t quit. In the actress business, persistence and will are all we have; they take the rest, all of it, and don’t apologize.