The Gorko Gazette

Last Seen On Wells Street                         

From what I could tell, it wasn’t all over. Not yet. I hung up the phone after a collect call from the Cook County Jail. Reese was in again, and he was pleading with me to bail him out. It was the second time around on a possession with intent charge. This time around he was looking at some serious time, maybe a ten year bid. If he remained in custody I knew I’d never see him again. He was a friend in the days when we were all young and healthy and our bodies could take the punishment. Sampling the candy sold to a downtown flock. He wanted me to look up Faye, who was his on and off. I told him that this seemed like bad medicine, He asked me why.

I told him the last time I saw her she was raving and underfed, a big piece of chain hanging from one ear. It was at the Newcastle clinic; she shouted my name and I turned around. So did everybody else in line for methadone. I didn’t recognize her at first.

Laughing, she came up and spun a story about how she just got her stomach pumped. Next , she pulled a serrated razor from her waistband and waved it at me.

She was living on Division and Damen firing Percodan and benzos in combination every day, a habit called T’s and Blues.  To see Faye, it meant going Downtown. To bail out Reese, it meant the same.

Downtown is a part of town built entirely on swampland. There’s a few banks. Not many are willing and able to serve the needs of working people. I go to one of them to withdraw funds, but only on special occasions. Like if and when I need funds to post bail, or pay off a bail bondsman for the benefit of one of my loved ones.

Because I don’t make it downtown as much as I once did, I don’t remember much of what goes on there. The memory of street names, parks that served as sites of congregation, diners and cafes that were my haunts.                                                      

After a few blocks, I knew where I was again. In the shadow of skyscrapers, an area dotted with crumbling row houses. They stretch as far as the eye can see. On one corner sits a Savings and Loan with a drive-thru window. Much like any modern hamburger stand.

Apart from the length of the bus ride,  it presents another set of problems that usually go unsolved.

One of the bank tellers has a habit of his own. He likes to make cheerful conversation. At least he makes the attempt.  He’s got a liquid dish in front of him for wetting and sealing envelopes. A chunk of real sponge  sits inside it, soaked through with dirty water, porous and brown. He tells me about the money he sends to his folks back in his home country. He doles out this kind of information non-stop, in a series of nuggets. He has no handle yet on the English language.

He checks everyone’s line of credit after they leave. He’s not supposed to, but curiosity gets the better of him.  A workaday stiff likes to know who he’s  talking to.

I don’t often think of the time I spent on the move downtown. I now know it was a time without a hint of amity or any trace of precision thinking. At a minimum, sure enough, you need money before you spring into being, become anything or anyone at all. It’s in the give and take,  the will for transformation.

You can live life as you choose,when you’re up on a bankroll, seeing to your needs and wants accordingly. Depending on the order of appearance, you can choose  people selectively, and put them in spaces that are easy to manage.

I don’t have the ability to convince someone in doubt or recruit them to a cause. Especially when they’re likely to ignore my words, their eyes red rimmed and ears swollen.

They are always surprised when they see you.

Because they figure you get lost every time you go downtown. Because they tend to listen only to those who can kill them. They’re not easily convinced of anything at all, or easily appeased as to reasons why things happen…

The reaction is recurrent, they always act surprised to see you. They start bleeding you, it makes you think the surprise feigned. They are impaired.

When you’re young, you can take the heat, but only if you’re sized up as someone willing to die. Or willing to arrange your own death. We’re all just birds on the wire, taking potshots at each other and most of us harbor a notion we all have something on the other. Something to hold against. But we all have something in common, it is what makes us human.

Like the places where we make small talk. Underneath the grimy brick ramparts in the porter’s exits we try to convince each other of many things, but part company before we are appeased. We scratch our names in the cinder blocks.

What we lacked as mavericks couldn’t be helped. If it was held against us, we could care less. It was never quite yet the right time or season.

Everyone runs into trouble looking for and finding each other on the outside.probably because they only look in pancake shops. Staggering in after a cursory search of the waiting room at the Greyhound station.

On a daily basis, the pancake chef sat at a card table in the back during off hours. He drums his fingers on the table between games of solitaire. His manner is always absent.  

The one time we spoke, he wanted to talk about cannibals and the master race.

I was with Faye, during the time she fought in her comic wars, hysterical about the way she  blew past many sets of headlights, headlights after headlights, complaining about how the stoplights were too slow on Grand Boulevard. She liked to drive around the Western suburbs at night, and show up on the front lawns of chance acquaintances. She tried to introduce me to them, but they usually took no interest. She talks real fast, with an occasional coating over her tongue and lips. I never felt like I wanted to kiss her.

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Image: Frontier pay phone downtown Charleston WV July 2022.jpg