The Story of Charlie Mullins

by Jim Wygand

  “Bye Charlie, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do – or maybe that I can’t do!” yelled someone from the group. They all broke out laughing and Charlie went out to his car and drove home. He showered, shaved, and then splashed on a discreet amount of his Armani cologne. “I’m beginning to like you, Mr. Armani. You seem to be bringing me luck! Keep up the good work and I’ll buy some more of you!”

  He dressed his standard fare, blazer (a black one this time), a light grey oxford cloth shirt with requisite button down collar, charcoal-grey pants, black socks and pair of black Gucci loafers. He checked himself out in the mirror and thought he might be able to leave the first button of the shirt open. He did. Then he closed it again. Then he thought he looked too buttoned up so he opened it again. He would open and close the button another 4 times. Finally he decided to leave it buttoned.

  Charlie usually went up to Philly by taking the bridge over to Wilmington and then driving straight up I-95. It was the most direct and in his view the fastest way to Philly. As he was approaching the connecting road to the bridge he saw a car parked along the side of the road. The car pulled out and fell behind him as he passed. The two cars crossed the bridge and entered I-95 together. Charlie noticed that the car stayed behind him. He accelerated slightly and so did the following car. He slowed down to let the car pass and the car slowed down too. He looked more closely into the rear view mirror. He could see two women in the car. Then he remembered that someone said that Sharon Gallagher had said that she would follow Charlie “one of these days”. “Shit!” he thought “just what I needed, somebody tailing me!”

  He made a mental note of the license plate and the make and model of the car. When he came close to Chester he suddenly exited and then quickly went through some back streets. Then he headed toward Philly on the Chester Pike all the way to Wannamaker Avenue until he was sure he had shook the tail. He stopped along the way to write down the license number of the car, and then got back on the Interstate off Wannamaker. He got to the trattoria at 8:45. Gina was waiting for him and nursing a glass of red wine. Gina noticed the apprehension on his face. “Hi Charlie,” she said, “giving him a light kiss on the cheek, “what’s the matter you look upset.”

  “Jeez, Gina, would you believe somebody followed me from Shoreville? I picked up the tail when I got on I-95. It looked like there were two women in the car. I’m sure it was some of those busybodies from Shoreville. Christ! I mean if I were Bruce Willis or something, but Jesus, following me to Philly on a Saturday evening?!”

  “Take it easy, Charlie. Here, sit down and have a glass of wine. Don’t worry about it. Did they manage to follow you here?”

  “No, I got off in Chester and then drove around a bit. Then I went up for a while on the Chester Pike. I’m sure I lost them along the way. Then I got back on I-95 and here I am.”

  “OK, so your privacy is intact, Charlie. Here, drink a little wine and chill out. I told you there were some horny, nosy women in Shoreville. Had to be. Tell you what, tomorrow take a different route. Come up on I-295 and get off at Camden. If they’re watching for you to cross the bridge to Wilmington, they’ll roast in the car all day waiting for you.

  “Yeah, I guess I’ll do that. I could just stop and confront them too.”

  “Don’t bother Charlie. That will just whet their curiosity. They probably think you are running around some place in Chester right now and they lost you. Don’t let them rattle you. Do you think they knew you saw them?”

  “Aw, I don’ know Gina. I was so damned mad I didn’t think about whether they knew I had picked them up. I just got off the interstate and drove around until they got caught by a traffic light and I got well ahead of them. Then I just turned down a few streets while I guess they tried to catch up. Anyway, I don’t know if they thought I was on to them or not. Doesn’t matter much I guess.”

  “Well, I don’t think they will stop at this attempt, Charlie. They’re not going to rest until they find out where you go. That’s for sure.”

  “I guess you’re right, Gina. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Just be unpredictable, that’s all. I suppose they have families and husbands so they can’t be watching you all the time, Charlie. They have things to do so if you keep them off balance, they won’t know how to monitor you. If they follow you, just do like you did today. I’ve had guys stalk me in the past and it’s not too hard to keep them off balance once you get the hang of it.”

  “Well, let’s just forget it. What do you want to do tonight?”

  “Do you like jazz, Charlie? There’s a great little jazz place and a bistro nearby. We could have dinner and then listen to some jazz if that’s OK.”

  “Wow, terrific! I love jazz. I didn’t know you were a fan. Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic program.”

  As usual, Johnny hailed a cab for them and they left the trattoria for the bistro. Charlie noticed that Johnny waited again by the door until the cab pulled away. “Johnny must really like you, Gina. He makes sure you leave safely every time. I see him watching until the cab pulls away and he is even hanging around when we come back.”

  “Well, I told you, Charlie. I tutor his kids and I’ve known him for some time. I guess he feels protective, just like all my friends do.”

  “Yeah, if there is one thing I’ve noticed about your friends it’s that to the last one they try to protect you.”

  “They love me, Charlie. Most of them have known me since I was a young girl. Many went to grammar school and high school with me. They know that I lost my parents when I was a child and I guess they all see me as a bit vulnerable emotionally. I guess in some ways I am, but I am also strong in ways they don’t really understand. I am what you might call resilient, Charlie. I can bounce back pretty quick and I have learned over the years to deal with disappointment and not to idealize people. But my friends protect me anyway, and I love them for their concern.”

  “Well, so far every one of them that I have met has been a really nice, unpretentious and open person. You pick your friends well, Gina.”

  “I think so, and I’m glad you like them. They have all said they like you.”

  After dinner at the bistro where they swapped stories about their respective weeks, they left for the jazz cellar. It was a typical jazz place. You walked down a flight of stairs where tables were bunched up around a makeshift stage area. A single spotlight in the ceiling illuminated a trio. A piano, an acoustic bass, and a drum set played sets of old jazz standards. It was the kind of melodic jazz that Charlie liked. Moreover, it was romantic. The dark cellar and easy listening jazz was about as good as it gets when you are with a beautiful woman. The waiter showed them to a quiet table where they were a little separated from the other patrons and away from the trio so they were able to talk without talking over the music. It looked to Charlie like the best table in the house.

  Again, Charlie was amazed at how beautiful women always seem to get the best without even having to ask. They ordered drinks – scotch on the rocks for Charlie and a manhattan with two cherries for Gina. When the drinks arrived Gina said, “They make a wicked manhattan here, Charlie, have a taste.” Charlie sipped the manhattan and it was perfect – not too sweet, not too dry. “I really don’t like manhattans that much, Charlie, I’m crazy about cherries,” Gina laughed.

  They clinked their glasses together and before Charlie could say anything Gina said, “To the horny wives of Shoreville – they sure as hell know what they’re missing!” She broke out into a laugh.

  Charlie laughed with her and said, “Gina, that’s the first time I’ve heard a profane word from you since I’ve known you.”

  “Surprised Charlie Mullins? I’m not Little-Bo-Peep you know. I can hold my own with the best of them. I’m a Philly broad, remember?” and she laughed again.

  She reached over and unbuttoned his first button on his shirt, “Look at you, all buttoned up like an executive! Let’s open that shirt and relax a bit.” That solved Charlie’s problem about whether to
button or unbutton the first one. He thought he would blow up when Gina unbuttoned his shirt and the temptation just to rip it completely off seized him.

  Gina was in a really light mood and Charlie had never seen her so relaxed. She was completely at ease with him and he felt like he owned the entire world. The trio did a jazz rendition of “Stairway to the Stars” followed by “Stardust”, two of Charlie’s favorites and he noticed that Gina would close her eyes for a few seconds and savor the music. She was in a romantic mood and so was Charlie.

  “It’s nice here, no Charlie? So relaxed.”

  “You bet. I love this kind of music and the place. Not many places like this in Shoreville and I enjoy jazz trios. I remember when I was a kid and we would go to Atlantic City – before the casinos. There were always some guys on the beach or the boardwalk playing music. They’d have a set of conga drums and an acoustic guitar. Once in a while there would be a singer there too. I used to love to just stand there and listen.”

  Gina reached across the table and squeezed Charlie’s hand. “I think you’re a great guy Charlie Mullins.” She didn’t remove her hand and Charlie covered hers with his other hand.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes and Charlie, emboldened by her gesture and the romantic environment, said, “Gina, I think all the time about you. I can’t wait to get up here to see you. If I could I would be around you all the time. I feel like a kid when we are together. Even if our relationship never goes beyond friendship, I want you to know that I would never, ever do anything that I thought would hurt you. You’re special to me, Gina, more special than you are even to your wonderful friends.”

  “I’m sure our relationship is going to take us beyond friendship, Charlie. I haven’t known you long, but I think I am a pretty good judge of people. I trust you Charlie. I think I know what you value and what you don’t. You really believe the things you say and you live them. I admire that and I have looked for it in the people I have met and generally found it lacking. In a word I guess I am saying you have character, Charlie. And character to me is more important than money, than advancing in this world, even more than my friends. I drop anyone from my circle of friends who does not have character. I would never be able to love someone who did not have character. And I don’t believe character means following a bunch of rules imposed by society. Character arises from loyalty. Loyalty first to one’s family, to friends, and most of all to oneself. A person with character keeps his word. I grew up in South Philly around a lot of poor people. Many, like my uncle, were Sicilian immigrants who spoke practically no English. I went to school with their kids. Some of them stole to feed their families. They cheated the bosses that hired them at sub-human wages. Some of them ran numbers. Some were enforcers for the Black Hand. They had to survive and they did so the best way they could. I would never judge them.”

  “I know what you mean, Gina. My great-grandparents came from Western Ireland. Their land was taken over by Irish landlords to raise horses. The family was part of a deliberate effort by the Irish elite to “export” their own people. They called it ‘landlord assisted emigration’. You were assisted by the local sheriff who tore down your cottage and the goons of the landlord who marched you down to a boat at the point of a shotgun. At the dock you signed on to work in America. The company hiring you covered the cost of passage which they would deduct from your meager wages once over here. It was a lot cheaper than having to feed the people when the potato famine struck. Some people were so starved they even ate the same grass the landlord’s horses grazed on. I guess the landlords didn’t want to share even that grass. Those that couldn’t leave were put into forced labor and allowed to die. The English helped, of course, but they were largely content to let the Irish landlords kill their own. That’s the English way.”

  “I never knew much about the Irish, Charlie. That’s a horrible story.”

  “You should see the newspaper articles from the ‘London Times’ during the potato famine! One article was about a man on a works project. He was seen leaning on his shovel instead of digging up the field as he had been ordered. The reporter had cited him as an example of the lazy, good-for-nothing Irish. When someone went out to see why the man wasn’t working they discovered that he was dead! Dead, Gina! The guy died propped up on a shovel. Another article informed the world that the Irish were little more than primitive cannibals because a bunch of starving people attacked and ate parts of the corpse of a man who had drowned and his body washed up on shore. And every St. Patrick’s Day, the descendents of those unfortunate wretches go out and parade, yell ‘Erin Go Bragh’, and wear green in honor of their Irish ‘heritage’. They give money to the IRA in the ridiculous belief that they are somehow supporting the noble cause of Irish independence. The only thing Irish about me is my name, Gina. How can anyone proudly claim a cultural inheritance from a country that tried to kill them?”

  “Wow, Charlie. Ireland sounds like it suffered even more than Sicily that was invaded over and over by outsiders.”

  “Well, I don’t know much about the history of Sicily but I’m not sure one can compare levels of suffering. Suffering is personal. It’s like pain. Everyone has a certain threshold. One man’s suffering is another man’s absolute grief. There’s no way to put a number or a value on horror and suffering.”

  “I agree,” Gina said, “my grandparents came over from Sicily as displaced persons. They arrived here with about twenty-five dollars and everything else they owned in a small suitcase that each was allowed to bring along. My uncle was five years old when his parents brought him over from a war-ravaged Sicily. He spoke only Sicilian dialect and for years spoke with a heavy accent. Kids in school gave him a hard time. A Sicilian priest, Father Pesce, who was assigned to the local parish took him under his wing and helped him learn English. Life was tough for him and he worked damned hard to advance. He was a tough kid. I guess that’s where I get my resilience. He made it in a hostile world and he owes nobody any favors, except perhaps that kindly priest. To me he is a study in personal character.”

  “My grandfather was like that. He was orphaned at the age of nine. There were eight other kids in the family. His father was killed by a train one night as he was coming home from work in the Pennsylvania anthracite mines. He’d been drinking with a few friends. He couldn’t hear the train. Did you know that if the wind is blowing the wrong way, you can’t hear a train coming up behind you? My great-uncle told me that. They brought his body home in two pieces. His wife died a year later from what they called blood poisoning. She cooked for the miners and sewed for their wives after her husband died, and one day she cut herself while preparing something or other. She developed an infection that eventually spread through her body and killed her. The older girls in the family went to work as servants of local families while the older boys went to work in the mines. Only one, the youngest, who was seven years old when his mother died, was not able to work. He stayed with one of the sisters. My grandfather worked on what they called the “breaker”. His job was to break pieces of shale off the hard coal. Shale has a lot of sulfur in it and it had to be removed so it would not accumulate in the chimneys of the steel mills and other industries that burned anthracite or when they converted the coal to coke, I don’t really know. When he didn’t work fast enough, the supervisors would throw small stones at his back as he sat on the breaker. Nine years old, Gina! Yet, I never heard him complain about the life he led. He worked all his life, enjoyed life to the full, and held down two jobs during the Depression to keep his family alive. When he died, poor of course, my aunt found an envelope in his dresser with some money in it. On the envelope in his scrawled handwriting was ‘For my funeral’. He used to say that every man should be able to at least pay for his own funeral rather than burden his family. Until the day he died he sent every grandchild and great-grandchild one dollar on their birthday. I was working and making good money and he would still send me a dollar on my birthday. It was the most precious dollar I had ever recei
ved. He had character, real character.”

  “Well, Charlie, it looks like we come from pretty solid stock. Your grandfather and my uncle would probably have hit it off pretty well even if your grandfather was Irish!” Gina laughed.

  “No doubt about it,” replied Charlie, “but I’m more interested in how you and I hit it off, Gina. I mean if you want us to just be close friends or you are not interested in a relationship, I understand. But I have to raise the question. I at least want to be on the same sheet of music as you are.”

  “Charlie Mullins, how corporate! Same sheet of music!” Charlie turned crimson, “Of course we are, as you say ‘on the same sheet of music’! And, I must say you blush handsomely!” Charlie turned even redder. “I hope this works Charlie because I really do want it to. I want our relationship to be much, much more than just a friendship.” Gina leaned close to him and gave him a long, tender kiss on the mouth. When she pulled away, Charlie could only stare into her eyes. He was speechless for the first time in his life.

  “I’m going to have to tell my uncle about this, Charlie. He knows about you and knows I care for you, but I want him to know how really important you are to me.”

  “Fine, Gina. We have time. I don’t know how much more we have to learn about each other because I’m sure it’s a lot and I’m equally sure that nothing I could learn would change my mind about you. I respect your need to talk to your uncle. I talk to my parents about you too, at their gravesite, but obviously I don’t get much feedback!”

  Gina smiled tenderly, “That’s nice Charlie. It’s nice that you continue to honor your parents in memory. They must have been wonderful people.”

  “Well, Gina, where do we go from here? I hadn’t really planned this conversation, it just kind of happened.”

  “Kind of happened, Charlie? I was hoping that this jazz cellar and the romantic environment might draw you out a bit. I confess that I was curious about how you really felt. When you showed up with your shirt buttoned up to one button shy of the collar I thought ‘Gina, you gotta make this guy relax’”