Set in the gritty, vibrant underbelly of late-1970s Chicago, Lakefront Wolves is a raw, visceral coming-of-age tale that follows Finn Kelly, an eighteen-year-old high school senior grappling with a turbulent inner world and a penchant for violence. This short novel dives deep into Finn’s psyche, blending psychological horror, crime, and rebellion against the backdrop of Chicago’s affluent North Shore and its criminal underworld.
Through Finn’s eyes, readers experience a world of drugs, rage, and retribution, where loyalty and betrayal blur, and the line between sanity and madness is as fragile as a snowflake. Finn Kelly is a paradox: an All-State quarterback, A-student, and drug enthusiast with a hair-trigger temper. Haunted by years of bullying, Finn carries deep emotional scars that fuel his volatile behavior. His memories of humiliation, particularly at the hands of his adolescent peers resurface as he navigates a world of escalating criminal pursuits.
Set in the gritty, vibrant underbelly of late-1970s Chicago, Lakefront Wolves is a raw, visceral coming-of-age tale that follows Finn Kelly, an eighteen-year-old high school senior grappling with a turbulent inner world and a penchant for violence. This short novel dives deep into Finn’s psyche, blending psychological horror, crime, and rebellion against the backdrop of Chicago’s affluent North Shore and its criminal underworld.
Through Finn’s eyes, readers experience a world of drugs, rage, and retribution, where loyalty and betrayal blur, and the line between sanity and madness is as fragile as a snowflake. Finn Kelly is a paradox: an All-State quarterback, A-student, and drug enthusiast with a hair-trigger temper. Haunted by years of bullying, Finn carries deep emotional scars that fuel his volatile behavior. His memories of humiliation, particularly at the hands of his adolescent peers resurface as he navigates a world of escalating criminal pursuits.
A lively outdoor party of about seventy teenagers. Subdued laughter. The Who’s current hit song, “Who (the fuck) Are You?” thunders out of a pair of JBL L100 speakers wired into an expensive Sansui 9090 DB stereo receiver sheltered inside an open garage. Nobody’s dancing. Everybody’s drinking. Everybody being the high school seniors wearing pastel Izod Lacoste polos, Bermuda shorts and sandals who boast grand bullshit stories about their summer vacations with Mother and Father in Europe and South America.
Here they have gathered on this stale and humid Friday night in late-August, 1978 in the quiet suburban neighborhood called, “Tall Trees” where big brick homes sit on bigger tree-filled lots in the village of Glenbrook on Chicago’s North Shore. This is a party of pretentious, upper-middle class cartoon-character teenagers who pretend to be cool and important, just the way Mommy and Daddy trained them. The generic pastel country club boys lamely pitch trite pickup lines to their snobby underfed girlfriends in a futile effort to get laid before they return to their senior year fall semester next week.
The volume of “Who (the fuck) Are You” abruptly lowers. The incel flirting and insipid conversational chatter stops. Silence. Attention transfers. Toward the sound that is rising in volume. The rhythmic series of thudding and grunting sounds coming from the end of the home’s driveway near the street, as if The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, was banging out these brutal beats on his drums.
At that very moment I am thinking about the writer, Conrad Aiken, and his thoughts about psychological horror and alienation as they relate to snow. Why? Not sure yet, but I’ve become mesmerized by it. Chicago snow I’m familiar with; I grew up here. Aiken’s snow is different. Tantalizing. Soothing. Especially in August. My snow flake thoughts fall, blow, and drift within the dark gray crevices of my brain, then freeze on Aiken’s phrase: "It was not only lovely, it was secret. If anyone found out, it would be gone, it would stop, it would melt." Melt... Hmm. Would my mind melt? What? Hmm... I read last year about the “Miracle of the Snow” at St. Mary Major Basilica on the feast of Our Lady of the Snows, which is on August 5th, that commemorates a miraculous snowfall in Rome in the middle of summer in the 4th century. Imagine that. Where am I right now? Slipping and sliding out of a mental snowstorm, while getting plowed with the relentless repetition of the hot and bright fiery starbursts of phosphene that beautifully explode within the dark secret world of my visual cortex. My eyes are closed. I wince on each hard echoing thud that slams into my occipital lobe. It might be cool to observe this if it wasn’t happening to me. Tight solid fists pummeling flesh and bone. My flesh. My bone. Mostly my face and around my eyes, thus the starry starry night, bright, fiery starbursts like a Fourth of July fireworks show that’s not quite loud enough to drown out the earworm song lyric repetitively sung by Karen Carpenter, “On the day that you were born the angels got together And decided to create a dream come true So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair of gold And starlight in your eyes of blue!” Boom! Boom! Boom! She was a drummer, too. Her song’s drum beats now mesh with my beating, just as the owner of this party house, a shithead named Randy Strand, interrupts Karen by yelling down at me, sequenced between the beats and starbursts, “Wrong! Fucking! Party!”
Because I am at Randy’s house. With the large, aforementioned crowd of high school kids. But Randy and this crowd of friends attend a high school different than my own. Most of them congregate in silence around a keg of beer, probably Heineken, up by Randy’s open garage. They vacantly stare down the driveway as they sip from their Red Solo cups, watching with indifference the violence occurring near the street, on the sidewalk, where douchebag Randy and three of his dirtbag friends punch and kick a muscular kid who wears scuffed motorcycle boots, jeans and a ripped t-shirt. A kid who is solidly and immovably down on all fours on the white sidewalk, stoically taking the beating. Who the fuck are you? Daltrey sings. I am the who the fuck am I. But this isn’t Whoville.
My body jolts as I absorb the nonstop blows. In fact, I barely feel them. I rigidly remain unmoved in my four-point position. My eyes are swelling. My teeth cut my lips and the insides of my cheeks. Blood sprays from my mouth creating a dark red spatter pattern on the white concrete that begins to resemble Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist painting, Red Number 5.
I’m usually the smartest guy in the room. But not tonight. Nope. Not by a longshot. I fucked up. Because I am fucked up. On a couple of Rorer 714 Quaaludes I took an hour ago for, as Rorer’s marketing tag suggests, a “quiet interlude,” which I had been looking forward to because I like sedatives and hypnotic medications that help me manage my overactive imagination. Rorer declares their Quaaludes put its “victims” out for the count; either voluntarily or otherwise. Victims? Lol. But I’m not out. I remain sturdy on my hands and knees in my immovable four-point wondering between Karen’s words of angels and moondust and the thudding punches, how the fuck Rorer’s ludes transported me to the wrong fucking party. Should’ve only taken one, not two. Always excess. Fuck me. That makes Randy correct about me being at the wrong party. I hate losing a competition or a game by getting my shit wrong, especially against a weaker opponent like this faggot, Randy. Self-sabotage always pisses me off. A lot. Which can cause me to, at times, overreact, and become rapidly explosive. Like nitro. And then things tend to go BOOM.
Randy’s three friends, out of breath now from throwing many many punches, stop, straighten up, and stare down at me, wondering why I’m not unconscious. Randy finally tires. He stops punching. But then kicks me hard in the ribs to finish.
I groan. Then very slowly, I unsteadily rise to my feet. Dripping blood like a horror film zombie that will not die. I’m six feet tall and weigh two hundred pounds, most of it muscle. I coordinate my balance in my scuffed motorcycle boots. My face is bloody of course, my left eye has swollen shut. I check my teeth with my tongue, they seem to be where they belong. I spit a gob of phlegmy blood on the sidewalk and take a deep breath.
Randy, out of breath, mocks me, “All-State quarterback, huh? That can’t fight, worth a shit? Why is that, QB1?”
I manage a small smile, because despite the damage I don’t feel any pain. I slur and chuckle, “I’m doing ‘ludes, man. Seven-fourteens.” I wink at him with my unswollen eye and say to him and his three douchebag friends as I stagger away, “See ya fuckheads. Real soon.”
My name is Finn Kelly. I’m eighteen-years-old. And, a lot of other things.
I’m in the shower at my house in Glenbrook. I live on the west side of town. My bloodstained hands grasp the shower head as the water sprays my cut and swollen face. Blood runs down my scuffed and bruised purple body. I lower my head under the soothing stream of comforting hot water. And drift off into a memory--
A school bell rings loudly, continuously, like an alarm signaling danger. It is. It’s four years ago. I’m wearing a Catholic school uniform: navy blue dress pants, a sky-blue button down shirt, non-conforming white Adidas basketball shoes with red, white, and blue stripes, and a thin navy blue tie that blows in the breeze as I ride my blue Schwinn Continental ten speed bike to school. I liked blue back then. I ride up to the bike rack near my grade school’s entrance doors. Kids’ bikes are already in the rack, as usual. I park mine and lock it.
This is my old school, St. Paul’s Catholic School, offering grades one through eight.
No kids are outside, as usual, because I always timed my arrival to avoid seeing or talking to anyone. Because we all weren’t getting along, in a Catholic manner. I reach for the front door handle and get hit with a bolt of anxiety. I try to focus, take a breath, open the door, and enter the empty hallway. My mind is racing. Wait, did it snow today? No! It’s mid-May, Finn, the eighteenth, the feast day of the Ascension of Our Lord. It’s going to be eighty degrees today. Say an Our Father! Shut the fuck up. The shiny brown tile floor emits the smell of fatal cleaning chemicals that Howie the janitor uses every night to mop the floor. Chemicals that have probably been slowly killing us over our eight years here in this Catholic school hell. No wonder Howie had no teeth. The ringing school bell stops. Silence. I hurry to my eighth-grade classroom and slide in through the open door. I quickly walk past my classholes who mock and ridicule me as I stride toward my seat in the rear of the room. I pass by the two bitchiest pricks in class, blonde arrogant Crooked Teeth Kylie and Gay Mitch, who had been caught last fall in the cloakroom with his hand down the front of Kenny-the-Retard’s pants. These two bullies lead the daily jeers directed at me like shooters at a firing squad. They and the others join together to murder me every fucking morning. This is why I arrive as late as possible.
Crooked Teeth Kylie spits out, “Bucky Beaver finally made it! Late as usual! Hey Bucky! Chewing bark for breakfast?! You got a load of sap dripping off your chin!”
The irony. Look at your own teeth, bitch. What have you been gnawing on, granite cock? She derisively laughs at me. Too loud. Too long. I never forgot how she howled at me. How I shrunk further inside myself under her daily onslaught. Her eternal silent days would come. I don’t respond to their insults even though they sting my soul. I hurry past her and the blackboards that I see are chalked again with giant white beaver faces featuring enormous buck teeth. These assholes do this every day. Every, fucking, day. I hate it. I hate them. But I don’t know what to do about it. Yet. But I will. And nobody in authority at St. Paul’s cares that this is happening to me.
Hand-job Mitch chimes in, “Does it take long to brush the wood chips stuck in your giant teeth? Do you floss the slivers out, or chew on them like Euell Gibbons? He eats pine trees, you know? I bet you eat pine trees, too!” He cackles like an effeminate hyena.
My front teeth are actually of average size but for some reason that’s what these dickwads focus on. I take a coping breath, and completely shut off all the external stimuli. My personal world is now silent. It’s secret. And I’m safe. I learned how to do this, all by myself, during an Arctic snowstorm back in January while reading my dad’s counterculture bible, “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. A few of his tools actually enabled me to take a bit of control of my hurricanic fourteen-year-old life. It was a revelation. But I’m still filled with humiliation, dread, and rage as I take my seat. I swipe the snow flakes off my desk top and think for a fast moment about my other deeply personal molten-lava issue that’s ready to erupt from the depths of my volcano. When? Don’t know. Now, I rigidly face forward, ignoring Kylie, Mitch and my heckling classholes, waiting for the clown show to begin.
Just as the hot Italian in high heels, plunging silk blouse, and an inappropriately short skirt enters our classroom. This is the wet-dream airhead known as Miss Giovanetti, our teacher. She’s in her mid-twenties and still hasn’t learned anything about social mores or professional standards of behavior. Hmm, I notice she’s not wearing nylons. It’s going to be hot today and our school can’t afford to install AC. St. Paul’s is a new and relatively poor parish. I feel a surge of testosterone as I stare at her legs, thinking how wet they’ll get later this afternoon as the temperature rises. Suddenly my anxiety is replaced with horniness.
Giovanetti glances obliviously at the blackboards with the numerous white beavers chalked on them as she sets her purse and briefcase on her desk. My classmates settle down as she cluelessly scans the room. My anxiety returns as I watch her. Hoping for once, during these last two weeks of school, in this Catholic school house of horrors, that she sees me and my angst. That she finally perceives what’s been happening to me and does something heroic to make them all stop! She smiles directly at me. Uh-oh. Anxiety skyrockets. Now what?
She vacantly says, “Finn! You got another “A” on your English paper! The only one, again! You smarty pants! You’re such a good boy! I wish the rest of you were as smart as Finn. As a reward, how would you like to erase the boards for me before we get started?”
I flush with overwhelming embarrassment. She talks to me like I’m her pet dog. Reward? Erasing the boards is a chore, bitch, not a reward. God, she’s so fucking retarded! No self-awareness whatsoever. My self-conscious humiliation grows exponentially. Driven deeper and wider by the only adult in the room who should know better. I start to sweat. I tightly grip the edge of my desk. Squeeze, release; squeeze, release; squeeze release; then slowly rise from my seat. In a sick-stomach daze I stagger toward the front blackboard with the giant mocking white chalk beaver on it with its huge buck teeth. I try to block out everybody’s faces as I stumble forward up the aisle, ready to projectile vomit. I could drown Kylie in puke. Mitch, too. Hold them down and drown both of them in my vomit. I’d like that.
Giovanetti is delighted without realizing her own obtuseness, “Wow kids, I see we have some talented artists in our class -- just look at all of these beautiful rabbits! Wouldn’t you agree, Finn?”
Kylie, Mitch, and the kids snicker... then burst out laughing!
The taunting beaver images on the boards close in on me. They’re fucking beavers not rabbits! The kids’ raucous laughter hits me with hard waves of distorted cacophony. To distract from the kids and the beavers I intently focus on Giovanetti sitting on the front edge of her desk in her short tight skirt. Her legs are slim, long and slightly apart. Her thighs are smooth. I was right, no nylons today. I catch a glimpse of her shiny white satin panties up between her thighs as I approach. I could see myself fucking her. Though my best friend Cole’s older brother, Sean, known as “Psycho Sean,” once told us that you never fuck crazy. I kind of get that, but I would definitely fuck this nitwit. Right on her desk.
Giovanetti and me are now eye-to-eye. She vapidly smiles and offers me the long cleanup eraser. I take it, and glare at her for letting this shit happen to me. Every fucking day. For five months. I turn around and face my classmates with blazing cold rage. They laugh harder! I calmly raise the eraser. And explosively CRACK Giovanetti across her dimwit face, filling the front of the room with chalky white dust particles that sparkle in the sunbeams blazing through the windows... that bring to mind my own secret snowflakes. And I feel much better.
I’m out of the shower and dressed. I shake off the remnants of my eighth-grade bucky beaver nightmare and Giovanetti sex fantasy as I hustle downstairs toward the front door. The ludes have mostly worn off. Good. My mom, Shannon, a sad-eyed wilting forty-three-year-old Irish beauty, stands by the door with empathy and, I notice, extreme worry.
“Finn? You won’t--”
“I have to.” I glance at her as I exit out the door. I stride with intent to my green Chevy Malibu parked in the driveway. I get in, and drive off.
Randy’s outdoor house party is still rocking. Loud music plays. Kids are drunk, drinking, and laughing. Some of them stand on the blood spattered sidewalk. Randy and his fighter friends are on the sidewalk laughing, drinking beer, flirting with a few uptight preppy virgins in their plaid skirts and penny loafers.
I slowly roll toward Randy’s house in my Chevy. Then stop about five houses away. I’m staring. I’m raging. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’ve been in this moment many times. How far am I going to go with payback this time? Will I end up in jail? Do I fucking care? No. Payback. I see the party kids on the bloody sidewalk in front of the house. Randy and his friends flirting with the girls who casually stand on my blood. My fucking blood. My mind spirals. I don’t know what’s coming. The rage inside me accelerates and redlines. I impulsively floor it. The Chevy’s tires squeal, launching the car forward like a guided missile. Picking up speed. Steering onto the sidewalk. Motorcycle boot down hard on the gas pedal. Accelerating right at Randy -- who freaks at my car speeding directly at him.
The drunk kids on the sidewalk react slowly, too slowly, then scream! Randy dives away. They all dive onto the lawn as I fly past them in four thousand pounds of cold-rolled Detroit Chevy steel. I barely miss scared-shitless Randy looking up at me as I rocket past.
I slam on the brakes and slide to a squealing, tire-smoking stop. I turn the Chevy around and slowly drive back to Randy’s house. I stop across the street. Kids scatter up the lawn toward the house in legit fear. Why didn’t I turn the steering wheel? A fractional turn would’ve done the job. Hmm. I put the Chevy in park. Calmly exit the car with my keys. Glance at scared-stiff Randy thirty feet away as I casually walk to the trunk. The party music cuts. Silence. Randy and the kids stare at me in shock and fear, unsure of what I’m going to do next. Good. Fuck ‘em. Maybe they’ll learn something tonight about fucking with the wrong person who accidentally came to the wrong house. I open the trunk, remove something from within its darkness, conceal it under my jacket, and close the trunk. I walk to my open driver’s side window and set the thing inside on the front seat. I turn around, lean back against the car door and blankly stare at Randy. I quietly say to him, “C’mon, Randy. Let’s talk.” Randy stares at me, then glances at his friends. They don’t look as confident now as they did earlier when they were all gang-banging me on the sidewalk. They look like the scared pussies they are, pussies that can’t imagine what’s about to happen to them. I smile at Randy, “Yeah. Bring your faggots.” I reach into the front seat area just as--
A Glenbrook Police cruiser slowly rolls between me and Randy. It stops close to me. Its driver-side window is open, revealing Police Chief Gallagher behind the wheel. He looks at me directly, with resignation, and sighs. I stare at him with my one unswollen eye. I know him, well. He’s an asshole but he’s fair. He looks out the open passenger window at Randy and his friends who seem to be very relieved. Then Gallagher turns back to me and says, “Your mother called Jack. And Jack, he called me... So. Here we are. Right?”
I nod.
“Go home, Finn. We’re not doing this tonight. Those fucking chumps aren’t worth time. Are they?”
The ‘Jack’ that Chief Gallagher just referred to is my best friend, Cole’s dad. Who is a criminal. A REAL criminal. Jack and Gallagher have some kind of arrangement, the specifics of which Cole and I have discussed without coming to an evidential conclusion. I stare at Gallagher. I can barely restrain my massive need to destroy Randy and his friends right now! In front of Gallagher, Finn? Fuck yeah--
Gallagher cuts off my moment of malefaction saying, “Tonight is over, Finn. But you’ll have another day. Right?”
He’s acknowledging how I feel. Okay. I dial down my rage. This is new for me. He’s offering another day. To deal with Randy and his faggots. I’ll take it. The time to think about a better plan and how to stay out of jail. I mumble through my swollen cut lips, “Okay.”
Gallagher nods to me. We have a deal. Then he turns his head toward the open passenger window. He speaks into the patrol car’s mic in a weary voice that is propelled out of his roof-mounted PA speaker: “This party’s over. Leave the premises now or I’ll start writing five hundred dollar tickets for underage alcohol. Got it? Get moving.” He looks back at me, and nods at my car like, “get in, and go.”
Smoldering, but feeling a little better, I get in my car and drive off.
Everything in my immediate space is black. I drift in space. I feel good. I’m listening to Chris Wood’s melancholy tenor saxophone on Traffic’s song, “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys.” It’s the most soothing song I know. It helps. Twenty-three-year-old Stevie Winwood sings, “But today you just read that the man was shot dead By a gun that didn’t make any noise But it wasn’t the bullet that laid him to rest Was the low spark of high-heeled boys.” Gradually, my bedroom becomes visible. In the room’s smoky darkness my bookshelves are holding a complete twenty-two volume set of The World Book Encyclopedia. More books on the shelves: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Breakfast of Champions, Siddhartha, God Is Dead, GOD: A Biography, Hells Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Be Here Now, Silent Snow, Secret Snow, and Sybil. Plus sports trophies for football, hockey, baseball, and swimming. I read a lot and play sports. I’m also a druggie. And a fuckup. I’m eighteen, and the days of being bullied at St. Paul’s are four years behind me. However, the days of those thousands of cuts into the caudate and putamen sections of my brain are still fresh. So my neurologist told me. I’m mostly mellow but I’ve been in trouble the past couple years. One reason is I have a hair-trigger temper. The doctors tested me meticulously with hardware and software but couldn’t find anything overtly or covertly abnormal about my neurological functions. But I know I’m not quite right. I speak well, I’m coherent, logical, intelligent, and social. I’ve had several girlfriends, great sex, and all of us still like each other after our breakups. Even after I had my heart ripped out by the first girl I loved. Dogs love me, too. So, all in all, I probably seem to be above average to most people. The docs said I did not have sociopathic or narcissistic tendencies, although that would have been more interesting. My significant problem, going hand-in-hand with my temper, is that I like to fight. I don’t respond to verbal confrontation the way most guys would expect. I don’t talk trash, push, and shove. I instantly punch the shit out of the guy. Boom! He’s down on the ground looking up at me. I like that. My twitch reflex reaction time is instantaneous. I don’t think at all. I suppose it gives me some sense of power. Instant retribution. For the situations I had been powerless in the past? Absolutely. I’m good at it and it's satisfying. Both positives in my book. My way of avenging my younger self from the denigrating eighth grade bullies who humiliated me on a daily basis. That repressed rage had to come out sometime.
No surprise coming here, that I had been to Chicago’s Cook County Jail for several weekend incarcerations a few months ago. Starting Fridays at 6 PM and lasting until 6 PM Sundays in the low-key Work Release Section of the jail. This penalty was for fighting with a bunch of Cook County Sheriff’s Deputies at a party where they were summoned to attend due to raucous behavior. And for then battling with four of them in a small bathroom after one Deputy managed to get a handcuff on my left wrist, which I pulled away and then started swinging the other loose one at him. More Deputies entered, I pushed two through the glass shower doors into the bathtub, then pistols were unholstered and gunshots were fired, mostly up into the plaster ceiling where its powder and dust fell on us all like snow. Gunshots in a small room are a lot louder than you’d think, is what I thought, and then, with the luck of the Irish, I escaped from them. Running out of the bathroom and out of the house like O.J. motherfucking Simpson running through an airport. They didn’t like that at all. They acted tough, got rough, but that’s another story. Two girl friends I knew picked me up as I was hitching home with my handcuffed hand in my pocket. When we got to my house they went up to my room. I went down to the utility room and grabbed a hacksaw. Erin sawed the cuff off. I hid the cuffs under the cushion of my blue chair in which I am now sitting. The Sheriff Deputies came to my house at six the next morning. My dad, who is an attorney, just let them in, without hesitation, or even asking for their warrant, to arrest me. Then he went back to bed. Probably with another nasty hangover. What the fuck, Dad?
I was the youngest man in the Work Release section. There were about forty-five of us in a large space, two to a cell that was locked at night from ten o’clock to five in the morning when worker inmates could leave any time after that to go to their day jobs. They then had to be back at jail by 6 p.m. Most of them did not work on the weekends when I was there. During the day you could watch television, play cards, read, or do whatever in the large day room. I did my school homework. The older Black, Mexican and Puerto Rican dudes left me alone. The only other white inmate besides me was an older White guy. He was friendly and quiet but we didn’t really talk. Everybody seemed to know who he was and left him alone. I found out from my cellmate that he was a big-time bookie in the Chicago Outfit. He looked like Al Neri from The Godfather. The other guys would occasionally wander over to me when I was doing my homework at a rec table, AP Calculus and Physics, and ask me questions about what I was studying. I’d explain the current problem I was working on as simply as possible. They’d stare at my textbook and notebook, the graphs, the symbols, the Greek letters, and then saunter off shaking their heads wondering what the fuck I was doing in there. I did a lot of wondering about that myself. I hated being locked up, with guards having control over my time and freedom. But, I fucked up, and my sentence could’ve been a lot worse. It was very claustrophobic and stressful inside. Lucky the room was huge and the ceilings were high. I wouldn’t eat any of the fake industrialized food. I didn’t sleep at all for the forty-eight hours I was there. Shannon would drive an hour down from Glenbrook to the jail on the Southside of Chicago, Twenty-Sixth Street and S. California on Sunday nights to pick me up when I’d be released at six o’clock. She’d usually bring me a ham and cheese sandwich and a jar of cold milk. We didn’t talk much on the ride home. She loved me. Always hired the best lawyers. But she didn’t know how to solve my problems. My dad didn’t really care. He mostly left me alone, which was fine with me, except when he got too drunk, nasty, and verbally abusive with me at the dinner table. We were a dysfunctional family in many ways, except for my pretty sister, sixteen-year-old sophomore, Ciara. Who was high-IQ, grounded, sober, pragmatic, and patient. She had a lot of the saintly virtues that I lacked. Where did she come from? Lol.
I would’ve been expelled from school but I was an A-student, top 5% of my class of over seven hundred kids, and an All-State football player. The Dean called me into his office one day after the cop fight and said that if I ever felt like I needed to leave school for the day, I could just get up and walk out of class. Any time, any day, for any reason. Cole and my friends were impressed with my new superpower. I never used it. I liked school.
My Jewish lawyer, Richie Goldstein kept me in school and out of Joliet Prison. I had been facing two-to-five years in Joliet for two counts of aggravated battery with injury to two of the four Sheriff’s Deputies in the bathroom, where I had been hiding, who drew their pistols on an unarmed male, me, and blew three holes in the ceiling causing plaster and dust to rain down on us like dumbfuck powder. They were “injured” (bruised) when I shoved them out of the way to escape my impending death in the bathroom. Two days later, after the fight, on a nice Sunday afternoon, I was with my mom at Richie’s house in Evanston sitting on a couch outside his office waiting for our first meeting with him. Mom and I overheard soft voices, due to the door being closed, of what sounded to us like several dudes with Mexican or Puerto Rican accents talking about bombs and machine guns, and Richie counseling them that there was a technical error with the warrant and he could probably get them all off. For seventy-thousand. Their meeting ended and the dudes exited Richie’s office. These four fierce and intimidating men coldly glanced at my mom and me as they walked past us in their camo jackets, black boots and berets. I wondered what they did and what they were thinking about us at that moment. White hate? When I asked Richie who they were during our meeting all he said was they were associated with the FALN. I looked them up when I got home. FALN was a highly organized and motivated terrorist group that was dedicated to “liberating Puerto Rico from U.S. control.” Gangsters. Richie was heavy. My problem for him to adjudicate was mice nuts. To get started he charged a five-figure retainer -- as if my problem was rhino balls. My mom did not want me to go to prison. So she wrote Richie the check. He did what he said he would do. No prison. And I learned once again that it’s very expensive to not get sent to where a very politicized and aggressive Cook County State’s Attorney, who is aching to move up the chain in crook county and join the U.S. Department of Justice, wants to send you.
My Technics direct drive turntable spins the vinyl Traffic record. Stevie sings, “If you had just a minute to breathe And we granted you one final wish.” I have posters on my bedroom walls. Chicago Cubs Ron Santo and Ernie Banks. Chicago Bears Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers. Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Traffic and Chicago. They’re my bedroom buddies.
Stevie sings, “Would you ask for something Like another chance?” I don’t know, Stevie. My life is pretty exciting. Not always in a good way, but I’m confident I won’t live to be twenty-five. Which is fine with me. Because I’m not quite right. And I don’t quite fit. These are the things I know about me. And accept. Maybe the next world will be better. Homework’s done, so I do another bong. My room is smoky. I set the red glass Graffix bong next to my baggie of green buds on the glass top of my Old Style beer coffee table. I lean back in my chair, exhale a cloud of smoke, open a pill bottle, and pop a couple blues, 10mg of Valium.
There’s banging on my bedroom door. I hear the muffled voice of a perpetually angry man. It’s my alcoholic, criminal attorney father, Conor Kelly. He loudly grumbles, “Turn that shit down! Fucking goddam transvestite Brit-pop pedophile drug addicts! Enough, Finn!” His voice trails off as he walks the hall, “Can’t you listen to some goddamn classical, or opera?!”
I stare at my door with the black and white “California” photo-poster of the naked blonde model standing up to her knees in ocean surf. She smiles at me. I want to move to California. Illinois sucks. Especially Crook County. My bare foot rests on a green push-button phone sitting on the green shag carpeting. The black and blue swelling on my cheek and right eye is receding from the beat down at Randy’s house last Saturday night, the night after the fight with the cops on Friday night. Last weekend was a fucked up two-fer. Even Cole was impressed. My face doesn’t hurt now and it looks cool. I sit stoned and motionless in my blue chair. I imagine surfing blue breaking waves while vacantly staring at the model on the back of my door.
Stevie sings in his beautiful soulful voice, “But spirit is something, that no one destroys.”
I hope not. Because I’ll need it to get to the next thing. I disabled my phone’s ringer because it annoyed me. Now when anyone calls it makes a hollow click-click-click sound, which it’s doing right now. I lean down and pick up the handset. And listen...
“Hey, Cole... Yeah.”
Now we’re passing city buildings, urban blight. Chicago is home to over a hundred-thousand gangbangers in sixty major gangs. Mostly Black, Mexican and Puerto Rican. You got the Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, Black P. Stones, Latin Kings, etc. whose taggers have spray painted every imaginable surface with their colors and symbols. I see a beautifully sprayed “red crown” with “LL” for Latin Lords inside it. I haven’t heard much about them. A group of demented ragged homeless men huddle near a gutted car. Their greasy hands pass around a bottle in a paper bag. Just as--
A pristine, lime green, 1968 Camaro SS passes them and parks curbside in front of an office building in the Loop. I’m inside the Camaro. Sitting in the front passenger seat in a bit of a haze, pondering the precarious status of my fucked up mental, legal, and judicial situations. I slowly say, “It comes in waves. Silently. Softly. Wraps me. Holds me snugly. It feels comforting.” Sitting behind the wheel of the Camaro is my best friend since we were ten. The slick, smart, well dressed and very aggressive Cole Wolfe. We’re both full Irish and admire Bobby Sands and the IRA. Our heroes. Irish gangsters. Tiocfaidh ár lá! “Our day will come” (in Gaelic) is our motto. Cole puts the Camaro in park and listens as I speak introspectively while vacantly staring out the windshield at the homeless men drinking by the gutted car. I continue, “A dark soft blanket. Smothers me. Slowly. I can’t breathe. So I roll with it. No fear. Follow where it takes me. Maybe all the way. This time. So I flow. And transform. Into a fucking ghost. Not caring. About anything at all.” I turn and blankly look at Cole. He gets it. We’re the same in a lot of different ways.
Cole says, “Like you’re inside of a soft, satin-padded coffin... Done. Dead. And gone... Yeah.”
“More like ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow.’ And we all know what happened to Paul.” I open my door, exit the car.
Cole says, “Wait, what the fuck happened to Paul?”
I smile at Cole and close the car door. I walk past the homeless men toward the building entrance. I mumble words to myself that later turn out to be a verse of an R.E.M. song, “Try. Cry. Fly try. That was just a dream. Just a dream.” Even though Michael Stipe hasn’t written “Losing My Religion” yet. I get to the office building door and look back at Cole seated in the Camaro. I watch a drunk bum wobble over to it, give it an appreciative look, and sit down on the hood. Oh, not good. That’s Cole’s baby. Don’t fuck with the baby. He tauntingly smiles at Cole. Cole rolls down his window. I smile as I watch my friend deal with the bum. Cole always makes me laugh.
Cole is surprisingly calm and says, “Fuck off my car, dude.”
The bum responds, “Who me? I take yo car you White brat. Think I can’t? Watch me, muthafuckah.”
Three of the bum’s psychotic associates stagger toward the Camaro. One breaks
his empty bottle on the curb and waves the jagged neck around. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t cut his own throat. Another slides a flashing knife from his pocket. He’s the dangerous one.
Cole raises his shiny chrome semiautomatic pistol and aims it at the bum through the front windshield. “Get the fuck off. I have no time for you idiots.”
Sunlight flashes off the chrome pistol across the bum’s friends’ eyes. They grumble, and shuffle away from the car. The bum slides off the hood, “Fuck you, you muthafuckin’ cracker! I gettin youse next time!” He staggers back to his drunk grumbling associates.
Cole smirks and lowers the pistol.
I’m in a two-room office suite inside the building. A sign on the wall reads: “Tysen Ticket Brokers -- All Chicago Events.” I stand in front of a thick bulletproof window that separates me from the sole proprietor, thirty-year-old Jewish ticket scalper, Ira Tysen. Motionless, we stare at each other through the glass with grim “fuck you” looks. Silence.
And then I say, “Phone hasn’t rung, Ira. Not one time.”
Tysen responds, “I’ll say it again, Finn. Twenty-five seats. Fifth row center. Fifteen-hundred. You fuckin’ get that you retarded Mick?”
I pull out a thick roll of cash from inside my jacket. I’m loaded. Twenty Bennies. I peel several hundreds from the roll. And touch my ear, “Your phone? Still not ringing. Three hours, Ira, until Ozzy rises out of hell and hits the stage. You’ll take nine. And be happy.” I fan-out the crisp hundreds and press them against the thick window near Tysen’s face on the other side.
He goes berserk, “You motherfucker! You’re killing me! God-fucking-dammit! Fuck you, Finn! Fuck you and Cole! You two fucking cheap-ass critters. This is Black fucking Sabbath! Fifth. Row. Center! Chicago. Fucking. Stadium!” Tysen’s breathing hard. He could stroke out. Hmm, I might get the tickets for free. A long, silent pause...
“Fucking eleven! Goddammit!”
Another long pause. The supratrochlear vein in Ira’s forehead is throbbing hard. I’m
glad I’m on this side of the glass, in case that thing explodes. I say, “Nope. Nine... Or, maybe eight-fifty?”
We revert to our cold staring “fuck you” faces... then, we both simultaneously slide the cash and rubber-banded tickets to each other through the narrow slot under the window. I fan through the banded tickets with my thumb to make sure they’re all legit; they are, and slide them into my jacket.
Ira’s vein has calmed. He calmly counts the cash. “You used to be soft, Finn. A nice Catholic North Shore goy. Almost humble. What happened to you, Irish?”
I walk to the door, “Everything. Nothing. Who cares, Ira. Fuck off till next time.” Tysen flips me the finger as I exit into the hallway. I press the elevator button, then walk to the hall window. I look out the window, down at Cole’s Camaro illegally parked in front of the building. A Chicago Police Cruiser slides up next to it and stops. Moments pass... The police cruiser drives off. I look back at the elevator. It dings, the elevator doors open. I walk to it and climb aboard. The doors begin to close as José, a twenty-year-old Latin Lords gangbanger slides sideways between them into the car. The doors close. He fake smiles at me. I step back into the corner, watching him. On cue, José whips out a knife and lunges at me. He presses the shiny blade against the side of my neck. We’re eye-to-eye. Too close.
José with the gang-bang talk, “Shitting your pants, Whitey? Let’s do this quiet.”
I’m calm, zapped on Valium, and chronically suicidal, “What? Kill me? Go ahead. I won’t scream. Promise.” José didn’t expect that. We’re face-to-face, staring into each other’s eyes. His breath stinks like cooked corn and tripe. He presses the knife point into my neck. Blood trickles. Now I’m annoyed, “Do it or get the fuck off me.”
José quickly pats my pants, coat pockets, takes the banded tickets from my inner-coat pocket, “Where’s the fucking roll?!” He reaches for my front pants pocket-- A hollow POP echoes off the car’s brown metal walls. Hazy blue smoke slowly wafts up around our faces. We’re still staring at each other, eye-to-eye. The color of José’s irises lighten from dark brown to tan then gray. He steps back, drops the ticket bundle on the floor. He stares at me like, what in the fuck? He drops the knife. Then he smiles, with amazement. And collapses to the floor. Blood pumps out of the hole in his gut below his sternum. He jams his hands over the blood-pumping hole. I notice that his top hand has a small tattoo of a red crown between his thumb and index finger. He looks up at me, smiling. I slide my pistol into the back of my waistband.
José is incredulous, “This... it’s fuckin’ real, man. Where... am I going?” His life fades. He becomes still. Eyes open. Done. Dead. Gone.
I quickly push the red “Stop” button. The alarm RINGS. I crouch, pick up the tickets and the bullet casing from the floor. I pull a bandana from my back pocket and use it to pick up the knife. I use the wrapped knife’s point to pry out the embedded slug that blew through José into the elevator wall. I glance down at José as I slide the tickets, bullet casing and slug into my jacket pocket. I drop the knife to the floor, use the bandanna to wipe down the elevator buttons, pull out the “Stop” button, wipe it, the alarm stops. I slide the bandanna into my pocket. The elevator stops. Doors open. I step over José body, look out into the deserted lobby, and quickly walk toward the exit doors.
I push through the doors. Quickly walk to Cole’s Camaro parked at the curb, open the passenger door, and slide into the front seat. Cole curiously looks at me from the driver’s seat. I calmly stare out the windshield. The bums are gone. Cole glides away from the curb, and smoothly merges into the Loop’s late-afternoon business traffic.
He says, “You got a good price, right? I bet the Jew wanted fifteen. Am I right?”
“Yep. Then eleven. We paid nine.”
“Nice! This is how we build our business. Smart and quick deals. Captured, engaged customers. And high margins.”
I toss the banded Sabbath tickets onto the dashboard.
Cole notices, “Blood? On your neck? What’s that--”
I touch the dried blood spot on my neck from José’s blade. “Must’ve scratched off a zit, or a mole.”
Cole smiles, “Dude, you gotta cut your nails. Girls don’t like dirty snaggly fingernails up in their muffs.”
“Yeah, Cole? Is that right? Perhaps then... a manicure is in order?” We look at each other, and start laughing, hard. At the preposterous idea of getting a gay fucking manicure.
Tears fill our eyes as we catch our breath. I take my pill bottle from my jacket pocket and pop a couple blues in my mouth. I wipe my eyes. “Turn on XRT.” Cole tunes the radio from WLUP Top 40 pop to album rock 94.7. We catch Cheap Trick’s song, “Heaven Tonight.” Robin Zander sings, “Down the line, couldn’t get much, couldn’t get much higher if you tried And tried and tried, you’re as guilty, it’s a crime, ooh, it’s a crime.”
Cole’s still thinking about Silent Snow, Secret Snow. “So, Mr. Brainiac. What happened to Paul? In the secret snowstorm?”
“Yeah... Paul... he went insane.” I look out the side window as we pass endless buildings covered with endless gang graffiti. My eyes land on the image of a spray-painted red crown. I close my eyes and say, “And Paul was okay with it.” Cheap Trick’s haunting chorus plays over and over as I drift, “Would you like to go to heaven tonight? Would you like to go to heaven tonight?” I reflect on the time I saw Cheap Trick at a dive bar called, The Brat Stop in Kenosha last year. I was seventeen and had my fake ID. You only have to be eighteen in Wisconsin anyway. Bouncers didn’t give a fuck. There were only eleven people there. At a Cheap Trick show. In a dive bar. I stood four feet away from Robin as he sang this same song. He has the voice of an angel. He may have been from heaven. I wonder what it’s like. This year, they’re breaking big. Playing the Chicago Stadium, twenty-five thousand seats. Sold out. They fucking deserve it. I hear the bridge of the song coming from the radio as I begin to float away, “You can never come down, you can never come down You can never come down, you can never come down You can never come down, you can never come down You can never come down, you can never come down...” Why would I ever want to?
Meet Finn. He's an 18 year old kid who has potential. He's bright with great school scores and he's also an athlete, a footballer of some prowess. He has it all going for him, it would seem, and yet, he's determined to send what could be a well-planned, stable existence firmly off the rails. He drinks, he smokes, he takes drugs, he has violent tendencies and he's in danger of losing not only his mind but all that he holds dear.
We follow him through his current life which involves hanging out with his friend, Cole with whom he's starting a little business of drug-dealing and ticket touting. He worries his mother, Shannon. He argues with his dad, Conor. He lusts after Cole's sister, Noelle. He takes us back into his memories and we learn more about the motivation for his actions and the experiences that have moulded him. As Finn sinks further and further into a life that skirts crime, more and more is revealed through the narrative about the people with who he mixes as well as the secrets they may hold. Steadily, Deegan takes us from first person viewpoint into a third person narrative which runs in tandem with what we see through Finn's eyes whilst expanding our view of the world of which he is becoming a part.
Deegan writes fluidly in a book that is very easy to follow. His story evolves smoothly and takes us to a satisfactory ending that concludes the action of the book, whilst also leaving room for more.
I will warn you: when I started reading Joseph Deegan's book, I thought that I knew what it was going to be about and for the most part, I was right. However, it still managed to deliver a metaphorical punch to the face which left me reeling. This is actually an extremely apt metaphor to describe the act of reading this book as I felt, on completion, like I'd been pummelled, experiencing things that I never hope to see in my real life but that I'm going to struggle to erase from my mind's eye.
This, of course, is testament to the evocative nature of Deegan's writing and you don't read a book about gangsters in the 1970s and not expect it to show the darker elements of human nature. But be prepared to be shown it in all its gory glory.