Danny sat in the wheelchair as the Grand bus was heading south toward its stop. The driver would have to step out of the bus and help Danny onto the wheelchair lift if requested. A couple of riders got off the bus who looked to be hospital employees going to work, and a couple got on ahead of Danny who appeared to be getting off work from the hospital.
“Excuse me, driver. I need help with the wheelchair lift, I can barely move,” Danny said.
“I got ya,” said the driver, a middle-aged African American woman with fake nails and an enormous amount of weave, makeup, and perfume.
When the driver stepped out and got behind Danny, he jumped up, pushed the chair away, and did a judo-style ankle sweep, knocking her to the ground.
“Sorry, I really am,” Danny said as several passengers gasped. Dashing onto the bus with the wheelchair lift still down, Danny jumped into the driver’s seat and made a sharp U-turn on Grand, almost hitting the median.
“What the fuck is this crazy-ass white boy doing? This some Columbine shit?” a black guy in his twenties yelled out as he ran toward Danny and punched him twice on the side of his skull.
A flash went through Danny’s head, and while he realized he was going to be bruised, he knew what he had to do. He began honking the horn repeatedly, simultaneously speeding toward Faheem and his captors as the passenger tried to gain control of the wheel.
All four people turned around and looked at the bus. A flash of recognition entered Farheem’s eyes and he began sprinting away as the bus hit all three of his captors and plowed into their van.
A disheveled Danny hurried off the bus. The passenger who had punched him chased him onto the sidewalk and tackled him. Two more men joined in and they began punching and kicking Danny while he was on the ground. Danny could taste his own blood in his mouth and pain shot through his back and ribs. As it was occurring to him that there was a real possibility he might die, two gunshots rang out.
The men cleared away and Faheem reached out a hand and pulled him up.
“Come on, we gotta get out of here with the quickness,” Faheem said, running to the car. Danny hobbled after him.
“What was that all about?” Danny asked as he painfully got into the car.
“The white boy named Bubba and the black cat he called Rello recognized me or something.”
“Where were they taking you?”
“Something about an abandoned farmhouse by Malden in the Bootheel,” Faheem said as he sped off.
Danny’s phone rang. It was the backup Big Man had sent. “We had some trouble. Out of it now. Driving away.”
“Tell them to meet us on Ohio and Hickory in those ghetto-ass apartments where all the Somalis live!” Faheem yelled out.
A few minutes later they were at the apartments. The plates were taken off the Crown Vic, and after all of their personal belongings were removed, it was set ablaze. They got into an all-black Denali driven by two of their brothers from the RCR and sped off.
“Where y’all need me to take you?” asked the driver, a young black guy and former amateur boxing star named Clyde. In the passenger seat sat Rodney.
“Stop by my crib in Pine Lawn and Danny’s place in U. City. Then we headed out of town,” Faheem said.
“Where we goin’?” Clyde asked.
“Straight south on 55. Down to the Bootheel. I don’t like leaving money on the table. They won the battle tonight. That was the decree of Allah. We’ll see who wins the next round,” Faheem said, still seething at having been briefly taken prisoner.
“They didn’t exactly win, Faheem. Those three guys are seriously injured. Maybe dead,” Danny countered.
“Maybe so, but we came for their money and we didn’t get it. Bubba left with the money, so it’s Bubba we gotta find. And Clyde, stop by the Walgreens on Olive near Danny’s crib. We need to do some nursing to my man right here,” Faheem said, putting his arm around his Jewish brother.
VII
Bubba got into the first cab in line at the taxi stand, a red one. He was initially caught off guard by the driver being a woman. Sure, he’d seen female cabbies before, but this was a strikingly beautiful woman. Not a white woman but not black either. Piercing green eyes, high cheekbones, smooth olive-brownish skin; this was a real beauty, and Bubba wondered what the hell she was doing driving a cab.
“Say, honey, let’s stop at the fillin’ station on Arsenal and 55. I need a few beers for the road if you don’t mind,” Bubba said.
“I don’t mind at all,” the driver replied.
“So what’s a pretty thing like you doing driving a cab anyway? Too dangerous a business for ya with all these creeps out here.”
“I can handle myself.”
“What’s your name, dear?”
“Ezdehar.”
“Huh, never heard that name before. Spanish or something?” Bubba asked, trying to figure if he had a shot at getting laid.
“It’s an Arabic name. I’m Palestinian,” Ezdehar said, hoping this wasn’t the beginning of a long, drawn-out political conversation. The guy seemed like a dumb redneck to her and the last thing she wanted was a political or religious exchange with his ignorant ass. She also knew once he had those beers in his system he’d become overly flirtatious so she wanted to keep talk to a bare minimum.
Ezdehar pulled into the gas station and decided to fill up the tank while Bubba was getting beer. As she got ready to check her oil, she received a text message. She glanced around and saw only one other car in the lot; sitting inside it was a thuggish-looking dude. The cashier inside, who she had seen before, looked like he was having a hard time staying awake.
Inside, Bubba grabbed a six-pack of Stag beer and some Gus’ Pretzels. On the way back to the cab he noticed how petite the driver was while she was still checking the oil.
“Need help with that, honey? That’s a man’s job,” Bubba stated, putting his hand on her shoulder.
“I’d really appreciate it. All I know how to do is put gas in this thing and drive it,” Ezdehar said, smiling and batting her eyelashes.
After putting the beer and pretzels in the cab, Bubba came around to help her out.
Ezdehar was small but had a very athletic and fit body. Her husband was a wrestler and had taught her a lot of moves. In her circles, those moves came in handy sometimes.
As Bubba began to read the oil, Ezdehar made her move. An ankle sweep from behind followed by a rear choke hold. Bubba, much larger and stronger, resisted and clawed, but within a minute his ass was asleep on the concrete.
Ezdehar calmly got back in the cab and made a call.
“That group text alert? Don’t worry about that. I handled it,” Ezdehar announced, suddenly in the mood to wrestle in a different kind of way with her husband. The thrill of choking that redneck and taking his shit, she wouldn’t soon forget. After all, that thrill was one of the primary benefits of being a member of the River City Robinhoodz.
The Pillbox
by Chris Barsanti
Maplewood
You put three skinheads in a room, they’ll form seven factions. It’s incredible. You would think that in St. Louis, where there’s at most a few dozen of us, we would stick together. But that’s not how we are.
The rest of the world couldn’t tell an Aryan Nation thug from a retro rude boy or straightedge. But among skinheads it’s all purges and internecine strife. It didn’t surprise me that there would eventually be a murder. I just wouldn’t have thought there would be more than one. Or that I would be pulling the trigger.
Me, I’ve never been a joiner. I just liked the uniform and the music. It can be easier to strap on a premade identity in the morning than to figure out one for yourself. As idiotic as it sounds, I first shaved my head after I saw a picture of a band in Maximum Rock’n’Roll. Even on that black-and-white zine’s smudgy pages, the skinhead singer looked like some aerodynamically designed vehicle for aggression. That was it. I was eighteen, already into punk rock, and breaking out of that hair metal and classic rock straitjacket hap
pily worn by every guy I grew up with in the half-rural, half-suburban, nearly all white deadlands of St. Charles just across the Missouri River from St. Louis County.
I had anger. It had been building all my life and needed to explode somehow. So I showed up for class at St. Charles High one Monday with a bald head just as shiny bright as the new, black, twelve-eyelet Dr. Martens on my feet. I wanted to give a middle finger to everybody. It worked.
The first week my nose was broken by two black guys I used to be friendly with. The one throwing the most kicks said I was a fucking Nazi. I tried telling him that I had just been to a meeting of SHARP the night before. You know, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice? But he couldn’t hear me through the blood. Clips of that episode where the racist skinhead busted Geraldo’s nose had been rebroadcast for months. My timing wasn’t the best.
The second week my ex-friends started calling me “punk faggot.” They painted Randall eats dick on my locker and looked for things to throw. Once a teacher’s back turned, the erasers, food, books, and spit started flying. Anything to leave a stain or dent on my shiny head. I lasted almost a month.
It was April of senior year, so the school let me finish up with home study. They mailed my diploma and hinted that I had more exciting activities to enjoy than graduation or prom.
My mother had a less-friendly suggestion: “Get out.”
My father had already split for Oklahoma with his praying mantis of a dietician girlfriend. But he left me his old gray Cutlass as a graduation present. So I threw everything I could into the trunk, popped my alarm clock on the dash, and sped down I-70 into the city, determined never to see St. Charles again.
I hit the places I thought punks would gather: Delmar, the Central West End. My newly acquired tribe was nowhere to be seen. So I squirreled myself away in dark corners of parking lots and alleys all over South City where a homeless eighteen-year-old could sleep without getting rousted or killed.
Having lost a lifetime’s worth of friends and family, I wasn’t discerning about the company I kept. I hung around Vintage Vinyl, checked out the flyers, saw every band I could at Bernard’s Pub and Cicero’s basement, and tried to make conversation.
I made the acquaintance of a skinhead named Gene at a ska show in some rich kid’s Great Gatsby mansion in University City. He was a lanky, genial, and none-too-bright military brat who had happily bailed on high school at sixteen, was booted out by his Air Force parents not long after, and now had more words to say than thoughts to back them up. Gene was twenty and at loose ends. He didn’t just need a buddy. He wanted an accomplice.
I was happy to make any friend, especially once he invited me to move into his place. The Cutlass was getting rank after all those weeks of doubling as my apartment. Gene lived in a punk house on a shabby block of faded one- and two-story houses in Maplewood. It was one of those tree-shaded neighborhoods clustered where the city blurred into the county that looked idyllic enough for now but was forever on the knife’s edge of white-flight collapse. The house was on one of the cheaper, rangier blocks close to I-44; plenty of space, and neighbors who didn’t ask questions.
The guy whose name was actually on the lease called it the Pillbox because of the thick brick walls and the little crow’s nest of a balcony above the front door. That was Anderson, the older art punk in the attic whose edge had blurred into a more general dissipation. Like most people on the verge of imploding, he had lost the desire to judge anything or anybody. He put up with Gene’s monomania, and the peculiarities of all the other lost kids who floated in and out of the house.
Anderson slept beneath a sepulchral poster of William S. Burroughs and kept a Webley .38 under his pillow. Like Burroughs, Anderson received a monthly check from the family fortune and had a thing for guns. Earlier in the decade, before giving up on the local music scene, Anderson had imagined the house as an art collective. There were happenings in the garage and experimental movies projected onto a bedsheet in the backyard. He soundproofed the basement to record music. That dream died as the bands broke up and people got married or left for bigger, broader-minded cities where they wouldn’t always perform to the same fifty people.
Now the basement was a shooting range. Anderson’s arsenal was locked up down there in a towering gray metal gun safe. He liked to hang out at gun shows and certain kinds of sporting goods stores where records got lost and serial numbers were filed down to nothing. On shooting nights, we would blast the Necros and the Effigies while Anderson judged quick-draw pistol contests. I went with the Luger, while Gene favored the heavier .45 M1911. My favorite, though, was the long matte-black Mossberg 500 twelve-gauge shotgun. With the Mossberg kicking against my shoulder and its solid slugs ripping apart the old Rock Against Reagan flyers pinned to the piles of castoff wood we’d snaked from a nearby lumberyard, I didn’t care how lost I was.
Anderson kept the utilities on and made sure there was always coffee. All the rest of us had to do was throw in a couple hundred a month for the rent and phone and take turns making sure the kitchen wasn’t bare.
I had a mattress, a door with a lock, lights, and access to a shower. I got along with everybody, more or less. Even Wendy and Shana, the lesbian-separatist poets in the second-floor room next to mine.
In a month, the Pillbox felt more like home than anywhere I had ever known.
Gene and I would sit up all night in his upstairs room listening to records. 2 Tone ska bands, mostly. Tight rhythms, staccato and yet steady. Like his voice. I listened to him talk about the old days that he hadn’t experienced and a once-proud British working-class subculture’s fall from grace. The ideals of racial solidarity perverted by racist pricks, and all that.
Gene took me down to a copy shop on South Grand where Reggie, the night manager, was an old friend of Anderson’s. He let all the zine kids and musicians print their flyers for half-off or even free sometimes. Reggie also made crisp and hard-to-spot fake IDs for bored kids like us.
We went to every hardcore and ska show there was—Crucifucks, the Meatmen, Ultraman, Drunks with Guns—but stayed out of the other skins’ way. You never knew which lines you were going to cross.
Gene had a lot of beliefs. But they didn’t include having a steady job. He was making five bucks an hour at the lumberyard a few blocks from the Pillbox. I got on there too. But our hours were thin and scattered. I was broke enough to start boosting boxes of cereal and pasta from the generic aisle at the ALDI supermarket.
We counted our pennies and donated plasma for twenty bucks a pop.
So when Tom and Drexel came up to us during an earthquake-loud set by the Urge in some yuppie bar down on Laclede’s Landing and started talking about work, we listened. It was a cold December night outside. I’d spent my last five dollars at the door and I didn’t know if I had enough gas to get us back home.
Tom was a lean, looming skin with a quick mouth but dead eyes that reminded me of Frankenstein. A onetime football star at Chaminade, he was another of those former jocks who had detoured into punk as an excuse for beating the shit out of people in the pit and claiming he was just slamming like everybody else.
Drexel was Tom’s shadow, a paunchy, shit-kicking hoosier from some one-moonshine-distillery Ozark flyspeck who had joined the scene with a religious fervor that bored anybody who knew him for longer than five minutes.
I tried to keep my eyes on the Urge. It was more of that ska-funk thing the local bands were putting on that had purists like Gene steaming. But Tom kept talking. He talked about skinhead solidarity. He talked about how hard it was for a workingman to make it in modern America. He mentioned his friends from Chicago and the operation they had.
First Tuesday of the month there was a drop-off and a pickup at Ugly Debbie’s, a well-past-rotten biker bar in the badlands of Sauget just over the river and south of East St. Louis. Pills were left behind and cash taken back to Chicago. Tom and Drexel had a circuit of 7-Elevens and fast-food joints they worked all around the county. Even with Chicago’s cut,
each of them were netting hundreds a week.
“The thing is,” Tom said with a low urgency, “we need help. Trustworthy people. Chicago wants to expand. There’s a lot of untapped territory.”
Drexel, a foot shorter and wider than Tom, nodded enthusiastically at it all.
“You’re one of us!” Drexel shouted over the thundering amps, as we shook on it. I briefly wanted to ask about the 4/20 tattoos on their knuckles. But I figured it was just more skinhead arcana and a question would paint me as ignorant. I went money-blind fast.
Much later, Gene admitted that he knew Tom and Drexel were in with the Hammerskins. And that they were probably in the group that pounced the black skater kid on Delmar the year before and put him in a coma. That night, though, he didn’t want to confuse the issue by bringing all that up. By the time I found out, it was too late.
That was eight months ago. Every first Tuesday, I drove over the river and through those eerie blank streets where nature fought a winning battle against what was left of East St. Louis. I’d flash my still-new ID at the doorman and stalk through the smell of spilled beer and peanut dust to the back office. I left one padded envelope and walked out with another.
It wasn’t a cartel-worthy operation.
“Son of a bitch,” the potbellied owner would say to me each time, spitting tobacco juice into his KSHE 95 mug as he eyeballed Chicago’s cut of the month’s cash. “You fellas do this a little bit longer and I can afford to shut this shithole down. Those East St. Louis niggers are driving off my business anyway. I’m thinking you skinboys have got them right.”
I grinned in a friendly manner and said nothing. Like cowards do.
The selling was simpler. Whenever we plugged in the Christmas lights strung around the Pillbox’s front porch’s splintered white railing, the store was open. Customers (Gene insisted on calling them that) entered through a creaking gate in the chain-link fence cordoning off the backyard. We sat on the two avocado-green couches that took up most of the back porch. I played cashier. Gene was the dispenser, giving out the little round orange pills from the Ralston-Purina giveaway fanny pack he strapped on just for the occasion. He loved handling the merchandise, saying they reminded him of the go pills his dad used to talk about the Air Force giving pilots.
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