Portrait of the Artist with Four Other Guys

As soon as Jimmy Boyle got back from Ireland, he went to see his friends. Roy, the Viper, Magic Frank, and Crazy Lester were hanging out under the viaduct on the corner of Warsaw and Bohemia, near Heart-of-Jesus Park. It was a late Friday afternoon in August, and Jimmy knew he’d find them there because the league games were over by four or four thirty and the boys liked to stay around for a while afterwards to talk about what happened. Jimmy had gone to Ireland for a holiday with his mother, his grandmother and his sister. They were there for two weeks and he was happy to be back in the neighborhood.

The Viper was the first to spot Boyle.

“Hey, Jimmy! Did you kiss the Blarney Stone?”

“Yeah, all of us did, even my grandmother. We had to hold her by her legs. You gotta bend over backwards to do it. My ma got pictures of me and my sister there. What’d I miss?”

“Roy hit two homers today,” said Lester.

“He’s always hittin’ homers,” said Magic Frank. “That ain’t news.”

“Red Dietz got killed,” said Roy.

“No shit,” Jimmy said. “How?”

“You know Red Dietz,” said Roy, “the one-armed pitcher on Margaret Mary’s?”

“Yeah. Lost his right up to the elbow when he stuck it out a window on the Illinois Central.”

“A line drive hit him right between the eyes in a game last week,” said the Viper. “Dietz died on the mound.”

“Who hit it?”

“Vidinski,” said Roy, “the third baseman for Mohegan Mortuary.”

“They picked up the tab for the funeral,” said Frank.

“Did you guys go?” asked Jimmy.

“Nobody liked Red Dietz,” said the Viper. “I don’t know anybody that went.”

“My mother did,” said Lester. “She dyes Dietz’s mother’s hair.”

“He was all pissed off all the time,” said Frank.

“You lost an arm, you’d probably be pissed off all the time, too,” said Roy.

“So what was the best thing about Ireland?” the Viper asked Jimmy.

“It don’t get so hot and humid in the summer like here. There’s a river goes through Dublin that’s pretty nice. Lots of old buildings and churches, stuff like that.”

“Do the people speak English or Irish?” asked Roy.

“Both, I guess. Sometimes I couldn’t understand what they were sayin’ in English. You know, like Cunningham’s mother. My grandmother speaks Gaelic pretty good and my ma, too, so we didn’t have no problems.”

“What about girls?” asked Lester.

“Didn’t hardly see any except for my cousin, Kathleen. She’s a couple years older, fifteen. We stayed with her family. One night after she took a bath, she came out in a towel and asked me if I wanted to use her bath water while it was still warm.”

“She’d already bathed in it?” asked Roy.

“Yeah,” said Jimmy. “They share it ’cause there ain’t so much hot water.”

“Too bad you couldn’ta shared it with her,” said Lester.

“She showed me her tits,” said Jimmy.

“Bullshit!” said Frank.

Jimmy nodded. “She did. Nobody else was around. Opened the towel and rewrapped it standin’ in front of me. They were the two best things I seen in Ireland.”

“Were they big?” asked the Viper.

“Average,” said Jimmy. “There were freckles all over ’em and the nipples pointed up.”

Clouds blocked the sun and suddenly the air felt cooler.

“Anybody hungry?” asked Roy.

“Let’s go to the Cottage,” said Frank, “get fries with gravy.”

The boys began walking west on Warsaw, toward Pulaski. Roy and Jimmy Boyle trailed the others.

“Do you think your cousin wanted to do somethin’ with you?” Roy asked.

“I don’t know,” said Jimmy. “You think girls in Dublin are any different than the ones in Chicago?”

Before Roy could offer an opinion, a police car drove up and stopped in the street next to them. There were two cops in it, one driving and one riding shotgun.

The cop in the front passenger seat leaned out his window and said, “Any of you seen two colored boys drive by in a lime green Cadillac?”

“I ain’t,” said Frank.

“Me, neither,” said Lester.

Roy and the Viper shook their heads.

“What about you?” the cop asked Jimmy Boyle.

“I just got back from Ireland,” he said.

“You go blind from drinkin’ the water over there?” said the cop.

“No,” said Jimmy.

“They got coloreds in Ireland?” the cop asked.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t see any there.”

“He seen his cousin Kathleen’s tits, though,” said Lester.

The cop stared at Lester for a moment. Crazy Lester was grinning.

“Are you Irish?” the cop said.

“No,” said Lester. “I’m Lithuanian on my mother’s side and Moldavian on my dad’s.”

“You better watch yourself,” said the cop.

Then the police car drove away.