two
AFTER MO RETURNED FROM MATERNITY LEAVE, the workload at the office was restored to its normal levels of unbearableness. One morning she brought the baby in to show us before dropping it off at daycare. On another occasion her partner came by with the kid to take them both home at the end of the day. Jane had met the partner previously but I had not had the honour. He seemed very vernacular, possibly some figure from folklore. There’s no telling who a straight woman is going to find attractive. I can speak from experience in a previous life.
Today Mo comes in and says, “Did you hear about the robbery at the video place?” She had seen the police there. I can imagine the reluctance with which Cult Video telephoned the police. Later, after the police had gone, she went back and was talking to the manager. Mo asked her if she felt like she’d been violated. “No,” the manager replied, “I feel robbed.” Apparently, she acquired a good look at the guy despite being in her usual drug stupor. She told Mo that he was tall and slender with long dead hair to his shoulders but bald on top so you could see the little plugs where he’d had transplants. I got angry to an extreme degree, something I do not usually permit myself to do.
Field research and recon, that’s the key in this sort of venture. I’d already walked the future crime site like the Stations of the Cross, once even taking Polaroids of all the major points, destroying them later of course by cutting em into shreds, mixing em all together and then walking round the downtown and distributing a few in each trash barrel I came to.
Beth knew a place where we could lay low for a couple of weeks. I outlined everything during our walks together. She’d sent most of her stuff, including all her unsold jewellery, to her sister, who’d moved back to Alberta to hang out with all those people that think dinosaur bones are skeletons of the Devil and the earth is only five thousand years old. She was quite good about waiting for the final go-ahead. That’s the part where the tension gets to people and they start to crack. But not Beth. She had all the frontier virtues. I phoned her at six in the morning and told her to be standing by. I knew it was early and she wasn’t awake, but even so she sounded very strange, like she was keeping some big secret from me. Was it strange enough to set off my automatic alarm? No. It took me years to know which of my instincts to trust and which ones to ignore.
I had the Stick with me. I couldn’t find a natural way to carry it. Use it like a cane or carry it under my arm? Nothing seemed right. I thought about sticking it down my pants leg but that’d be ridiculous. So I just tried to be nonchalant with it.
Early every morning the drivers at the big post office on Georgia leave their trucks right there in the loading area in the garage and go off to do something—I’m not sure what; get their work orders for the day or punch the time cards or just check in—leaving em unattended. If they’re going to the can, they wouldn’t be doing it at the very same time every day to the minute. I knew which ones left their motor running, which shut their engine off but sometimes left the key in the ignition, which ones practised safer habits than that. The trick was to move quick like a rabbit when at least one truck didn’t have anybody around it and there were no other drivers in sight and no dispatcher or supervisor walking the ramp. Intelligence told me that usually every morning at this time there was such an opportunity, but it was brief. What it came down to was a question of being fast enough to take advantage of it.
I was wearing a dark blue shirt, zippered jacket and blue work pants that almost matched and second-hand black lace-ups and new white socks, though I wasn’t wearing any of the necessary insignias. I felt like an idiot. My hair was tied back in a ponytail. Most of all I was out of place because of the Stick. I was carrying it out in the open but trying not to make a big deal out of it. I carried it like it was just something I always had under my arm, like everyone had one.
The moment came and I grabbed it like it was a passing freight. I took a quick look in the back. There were stacks of empty mail sacks, really a lot of em. This was an extra blessing: at least I wasn’t stealing mail. I drove out as quickly as I could without being too obvious about how I did it. Beth wasn’t waiting right outside her place the way she was supposed to be. I thought of honking but then thought better of it. I double-parked and went inside to get her.
When I finally caught up with Cappy Smith, he was over in Chinatown, winding his watch. Chinatown was only a couple of blocks long and you couldn’t really call it Chinese. It was just this smear of runny neon, a puddle of light across the Detroit River from Snaketown, which is where the play was. Boy, you should have seen old Windsor in those days. It was really something. The play! You can’t begin to imagine. To think that they tore it all down to put up some goddam park.
Today the young smartasses call it To Let Street. But in the old days Ouellette was like the extension of Woodward on the other side of the river, which was in its glory, not like today. All that’s gone now. But I can remember it if I stand at Ouellette looking east by Sandwich. There on the left side is where the British American Hotel was, down by the ferry docks. The BA was a Victorian-looking place, very elegant, very old-fashioned and flush with play if you knew how to open your eyes. You could get play on room service in those days. Of course, the Citizens never quite twigged to this, especially the Yanks, who couldn’t get over the idea that they had to come south to cross into Canada. Somehow that pissed off their whole concept of what geography was. It confused them. Maybe that helps explain how they were such pigeons.
From the BA you could spit to Riverside Drive, which was lined with big mansions built by the boys back in the olden days. When I was growing up, there were still people there who’d done business with the Purple Gang—Jewish gangsters, very famous. They showed you could unionize anything, including murder.
[When Lonnie said this, I thought of Elvis singing “Jailhouse Rock”: “The whole rhythm section was the Purple Gang.”]
This was different from what was called the Jewish Navy. That isn’t some anti-Jewish insult; this is what they called themselves. It was an organization that ran booze across the river in fast boats during the spring, summer and fall and used cars pulling sleds the rest of the time. A lot of the stuff was flown straight to Chicago. A lot was sent all over the Midwest and the northeastern states, sometimes in big tanker trucks, not even bottled. But of course a lot got drunk in Detroit too. Everybody was running booze on some level. People paid doctors a couple of bucks to write them prescriptions and then took the bottles over to Detroit in a suitcase. Penny-ante stuff like that. There were whole families doing it, whole streets and neighbourhoods. I’ll tell you this, speaking as a history buff, Prohibition brought people closer together. People that made money together stayed together. People that had to share secrets had a bond that was too dangerous to break. Old Log Cabin was the best there was.
No more than a couple of blocks down from the BA was the Prince Edward Hotel. It was near the entrance to the Tunnel, which people called the Funnel. Windsor was the wide end where you poured in all the booze, Detroit was the narrow end where it came out all day and night. The Prince Eddy was a big modern place with a plain front like a face with no expression. Very ritzy. Some of Snaketown’s most prominent individuals kept rooms there full-time. That’s one of the signs of a city, you know: when people live in hotels and leave their shoes out at night to be polished and come down in the morning and always get a cigar at the stand in the lobby, even if it’s a cigar for later, and always find a cab right outside. That’s practically the whole definition of Civilization. That’s the way we used to think when I was a young fellow your age. The fashion back then was for wide, wide trousers. I had a pair with twenty-four-inch cuffs, can you believe it, and a crease you could shave your face with.
[Lonnie laughed one of those laughs that sounded like it might turn into a wheeze or something even worse.]
My buddies and I would go over to Detroit to drink and chase the girls and listen to the bands. We’d always start out at Woodward and Monroe and end up someplace in the Circus. But that’s another story. I was starting to tell you about Cappy Smith, about the murder of Cappy Smith. He was the same age as me when he got deep-freezed the night after I went looking for him because I had overheard that bad things were going to happen. So I always felt that I was living out the rest of my days on his behalf, if you know what I mean. They got him while he sat having dinner with his girlfriend and her family in an ordinary-looking house. Four men, at least two with kerchiefs over the lower part of their faces, busted into the kitchen. Words were exchanged. One guy shot Cappy in the gut with a .45, then kicked him in the face and ribs. Another one robbed him of a few thousand dollars’ worth of jewellery and cash. Cappy and the intruders all seemed to be acquainted, though Cappy refused to identify them during the half-hour he had left to live. It didn’t look like the usual robbery. What it looked like was people from Detroit were delivering a message to the Mayor of Snaketown.
This was an incredibly big story at the time because there hadn’t been a really high-class gangster killing on the Canadian side in a very long while. Lots of sledgehammer stuff, but no killing. Even the Toronto papers went real big with it. Especially the Toronto papers. They all had people down here, swarming over the place. I remember that the front page of the Globe and Mail next morning had a black banner headline with type two inches tall: WINDSOR GANG WAR CLIMAXED BY MURDER. The papers were all sensational in those days, not that there wasn’t stuff to get sensational about. Aside from the fellows involved, I was probably one of the last couple dozen people to see Cappy alive. I really got scared I was going to be dragged into it somehow.
Cappy lived right here where we’re talking now, at the Dempster. Needless to say it was quite the place in those days. Big lobby with a humidor and all the out-of-town papers. It was owned by Harry Hourmouzis, long dead, who already had another hotel not far away. He was a well-known Lebanese all-round athlete. Not a professional, but he’d played baseball in an amateur league—that kind of thing. You were always reading his name in the sports pages of the Border Cities Star. His other place, the Royal, which still had an old sign on it that said YOUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME, was a centre of betting activity. By this I mean playing the ponies. The numbers racket was pretty much confined to certain segments of the population, but people all over the city, hell, all over the country, were nuts about betting on the horses in those days, even more than people are now about pro sports and lotteries put together. Besides the two tracks here, there were the four tracks in Toronto—the original Woodbine, Thorncliffe, Long Branch and Dufferin—plus of course Fort Erie and Hamilton. But this wasn’t enough to satisfy folks back then, and they bet on races at all the American tracks too. There was even one betting shop in downtown Windsor that broadcast the radio results over loudspeakers outside. The cop walking the beat would hear all this stuff about the fourth at Narragansett and he’d have to just carry on like he was hard of hearing. The rumour—that’s what we called the truth in those days—was that the Lebanese was paying some of the people at the station house to play deaf.
Of course there would be raids from time to time. Usually they fell on a Tuesday. That’s because a certain Protestant minister would preach a sermon on Sunday about the evils of gambling and the Star would publish it the following day. But the raids never seemed to surprise anybody. Least of all the Lebanese, who had long since expanded into fancy gambling clubs where there were crap tables and roulette and so on, in addition to bookmaking. Later someone set up a rival spot, the St. Clair Sporting Club. In these places outside the city limits, the rumours were about the politicians and the provincial cops instead of certain people on the Windsor force.
Remember, this was in the forties, before you could buy a legal drink of liquor in a cocktail bar in this province, despite the way it had supplied booze to half of America all during the twenties and into the thirties. Once in the late thirties a friend of mine, a grown man, actually got pinched for buying tobacco on a Sunday. It wasn’t the tobacco that was illegal; it was doing business on a Sunday. Of course he was a nobody like me. Rules like that didn’t apply to the Mayor of Snaketown or the Lebanese, who, everybody said, were friends of the working man, real square dealers. But this reputation took a quick tumble when, after one of the newspaper “crusades,” the cops raided the Lebanese’s permanent suite at the Prince Edward (the Lebanese didn’t live in his own hotel). They missed him—he got away through a back door—but he dropped a key that turned out to fit one of the security boxes in the hotel safe. They got a court order to open it. What they found was a box full of loaded dice. They looked and felt like regular dice, but no matter how long you rolled them you got nothing but sevens and elevens.
Besides the gambling there was the prostitution. A carryover from the horse-and-buggy days was the rule that to get a beer parlour licence you needed to qualify as a hotel and have sleeping rooms upstairs. Even the smallest beer parlour had at least three of these rooms. This was a great bonanza to the neighbourhood as the rooms were rented out to whores by the hour. The morality cops especially made prostitution raids, but the business was so spread out and so tied up with the gambling that it couldn’t be separated out nicely. There was a lot of jockeying for power, if you’ll pardon my play on words. Cappy Smith, a former beer-runner and one-time boxer (though he was just a short guy), was an example. He was a muscle type that would put the squeeze on some of the pimps—you know, for a rake-off—while also making book. As the investigation developed, it came to look like bigger fry were putting the squeeze on him in return. This is his story as best I can remember it, and I think I remember it pretty clearly.
Like I was telling you, when Cappy went in the Frigidaire it was big news. There were gangsters in Canada but Canada was also a place where American gangsters liked to come to play or hide out. There were reliable witnesses that saw no less than Al Capone in Windsor briefly, about the time he was having his tax troubles in Chicago, where more than five hundred hoodlums got killed by other gangsters during the fourteen years that the Volstead Act was in force. (Five hundred killings, a few arrests, no convictions.) It’s a wonder that it took twenty years from the start of American Prohibition for this particular form of public entertainment, what the papers called the gangland slaying, to arrive in Canada, which is what was happening in the Cappy Smith case if you believed what you read, which nobody in their right mind did in those days. I saved the clippings.
[Lonnie picked up an old scrapbook. The paste had shrunk, making the pages curl.]
It says here that “the murder of Smith was swiftly followed by one of the greatest manhunts in Canada’s criminal annals.” This meant they were rounding up all the rounders they knew and throwing them in the tank overnight on vagrancy charges. The cops were told to bring in Eyetalians especially. (That’s how the word was pronounced back then—and Cappy’s real name wasn’t Smith, needless to say, it was something like Cappy Vermicelli.) Cappy’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend and her family had told the investigating officers that the gang that burst into the house “looked like Eyetalians.” When they finally broke the case, the two suspects were Scots, the MacLeod brothers—Donald, who was about thirty and was always called Mickey, and Sandy, who was only nineteen. To tell their story I’ve got to tell you more about how things were run in those days.
Gangs looked to gambling and girls and were always trying to figure some way to control the whole pot in both rackets. But this was hard to do because of how everything was divided up not just according to neighbourhoods but street corner by street corner. You’d never see the Lebanese down around the Dempster here. He may have been here, but you’d never see him. He was the big cheese, but he had I don’t know how many little cheeses working for him all over downtown. Cappy was one of them. Cappy also owned a little roadhouse of his own outside the city (it was famous for its barbecue), but he made his public appearances, conducted his real business, at the Prince Eddy coffee shop, a great place in those days, run by a husband and wife. The wife personally made all the desserts and pastries, including a wonderful pineapple pie. I think she invented it. I’ve never seen it on any other menu and I never pass that corner even now without tasting it.
As late as noon on the day before he was killed, Cappy came into the Prince Eddy like a banker and six or eight runners took their turn going up to his table and giving him the betting slips they’d collected. He’d pay them their ten percent—that’s why they were called commission men—and then he’d phone in the bets and settle up what he had to pay out. He was a very powerful person in about a one-block radius of where he sat drinking the same thing every day: black coffee. Which is probably how come the MacLeods or whoever killed him heard about him. They saw he carried a fat roll of banknotes and wore more fancy jewellery than you’d see in a really good pawnshop window. The cops knew all about Cappy too. The previous August, his suite had been raided. They were looking for betting slips but didn’t find anything because all the paper had been burned. Being so unsuccessful, the cops hadn’t released this event to the press. Which is one reason why hardly any Citizens seemed to have heard of Cappy Smith until he got toe-tagged. The main reason, though, was that he was a big fish only in this one small stretch of pond.
The papers, which never seemed to get anything right and didn’t seem to care, quoted one of Cappy’s commission men saying that Cappy was killed because he’d refused to pay another twenty-five dollars a week in extortion money to some new muscle. That sounded pretty lame to me, as we knew he was already paying thousands a year in protection.Another source claimed he was exterminated because he’d refused to pay off on a race he thought was fixed. There were also stories, no surprise, tying the murder to characters from Detroit. Theories like that were always being floated.
But the first pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place only three days after Cappy’s death, though the connection wasn’t obvious at the time. In November 1938, three men and a woman broke into the Snaketown apartment of one James Senior, respected hoodlum and convicted armed robber, roughed him up a little and stole an awful lot of beer, whisky and gin. The complaint was laid by a character who was identified as the money man in Senior’s operation. Before leaving, the assailants ripped the telephone from the wall, just like the guys who killed Cappy later did. Those charged by the Crown were Joseph Coppalano (an Eyetalian!), John (the Bug) Howard, a prominent holdup artist, Mickey MacLeod (who had been in Kingston Pen as recently as two weeks before) and Mickey’s wife or girlfriend, Margaret MacLeod, known to everybody as Muff. On January 11, the day before Cappy’s funeral (an event so quiet, the Globe said, that it “might have been the funeral of a little-known labouring man”), Coppalano, the Bug and Mickey were found guilty. Muff, who was quite a looker, was found innocent. Only a few days later, Muff was back in court, testifying that Coppalano, the Bug and six others had beaten her, and two female roommates, after busting into their apartment, which was apparently not a domicile she shared with Mickey. You follow me?
At this point no one had pinned Cappy’s murder on Mickey, and so the raiding of bookie joints and the dragnet of suspects all over the city went on some more, except that by now it moved far beyond people suspected of being Eyetalian and became a crackdown on gambling and liquor in general. These were the two greatest evils to the idiot chief constable, who believed, for example, that bookmakers should be given the lash. He had been brought in right around the time Yankee Prohibition ended to straighten out the force, which had gone through a big corruption scandal. He was puffed up in all his glory with news stories about raids on a Snaketown address that netted a bank of twenty phones with their bells removed. Hundreds of people got questioned and a lot of them arrested in various parts of the city—a dozen in one twenty-four-hour period. The Chief called this real progress and asked the politicians for a budget increase. The fact that the grieving witnesses to Cappy’s murder weren’t able to identify any of the dozen in a lineup didn’t seem to matter. Finally, during the last week of February, after about six weeks of putting people in the Box, Mickey and Sandy were charged with Cappy’s murder—Mickey as the trigger man. Both, the public learned, had been free on bail, for different crimes (in Mickey’s case, a liquor hijacking, in Sandy’s, a Sarnia bank robbery) when Cappy was killed.
Mickey, who was a better criminal than his kid brother and a known associate of Cappy’s in happier days, was suspected first. The Chief ordered Mickey kept in jail as long as possible, while other prisoners who were passed through were transferred to Kingston as their cases were disposed of. The theory was that if he was confined in one place long enough, he would mention the crime to a fellow inmate, though this is not precisely what the Crown would base its case on. Meanwhile, the heat stayed turned way up, particularly along the streets of Snaketown, as the cops were trying to make the other pair in the case. The MacLeods had separate counsel. Mickey’s was one of the sharpest criminal lawyers in the city. His death a year later, of a heart attack at only fifty-six, was a loss to all those who like to watch a clever lawyer doing his work. At one of the pre-trial appearances (there were several remands), he tried to convince the police court magistrate to charge a reporter with contempt of court for printing information leaked to him by the cops, but the magistrate responded that the lawyer himself was more likely to be in contempt. Mickey blurted out: “We’re being framed, kangarooed—there isn’t any justice.”
A couple of weeks later, at the preliminary hearing, one of the longest anybody around here could remember, two men took the witness box and claimed that they’d heard Mickey say hours after the crime that he had just killed a bookmaker. The two men were John Cecil and Jack Odeon. Odeon was the son of a cop and was awaiting trial on a bank robbery charge at the moment he remembered this; Cecil ran a hand-book but right then wasn’t being charged with anything as far as I can recall. Odeon claimed the brothers had both been armed when they set out for the job, Mickey with a .38 and Sandy with a .45, but that they switched guns at some point along the way. The cops found the dealer who said he’d sold a box of .45 shells to somebody like Mickey and the bullets were the same make as the one picked out of Cappy’s intestines during the autopsy. Plus they lined up two bystanders who claimed to have witnessed the transaction, and the Crown introduced all this evidence. This was once the brothers’ joint trial actually got underway in Assize Court in May 1939. The trial would get an amazing amount of attention considering that it took place during the Royal Tour of Their Majesties the King and Queen.
[I looked this up and Lonnie was right. I gotta say though that for somebody with a lot of facts in his old head he sure got mixed up on his dates a lot. There’s no telling when some of this stuff happened. I guess old people are like that.]
Mickey’s lawyer objected a lot and kept finding obscure points of law. Once he charged that the police “deliberately suppressed information that should have been in the Crown’s hands.” He was aggressive that way. No surprise he often seemed to be squaring off with the judge, who would insult him outright every now and again. At another place in the trial, one of the jurors, overcome by the stuffiness of the room and the fact that the testimony was getting kind of gruesome, fell out of his chair like a parrot falling off a perch. A medical doctor, who happened to be testifying at that moment, had to shout out first aid instructions from the box. By then it was clear that the defence lawyer planned on trying to prove that the brothers were not at the murder house at the time of the crime. He produced a witness who testified he saw the brothers both ass-over-electric-kettle drunk at the Egyptian on the night in question when the murder was known to have taken place only ten minutes before, miles away. In a strange bit of business, or maybe it was extra insurance, the lawyer called the lads’ father to testify. The old man said he didn’t know where Mickey was on the night of the murder but Sandy had been home all evening listening to the radio. The lawyer also introduced evidence that went against what Cecil and Odeon had already said. He also charged that Odeon was known to police as one of the killers but, as Sandy’s lawyer said, had been “induced to lie” in exchange for his freedom. But none of this quite washed. All five people that were witnesses to the murder picked out Mickey as the killer and Sandy as his accomplice.
After two weeks, the Crown surprised everybody including the bench by resting its case without calling Odeon or Cecil to testify. Mickey’s lawyer was caught off guard, flummoxed. He was mad, but he and his associate fought on for several more days and then finally rested their defence. Muff MacLeod visited the press room in City Hall to flirt with the reporters while the jury was out. The verdict came back about eleven at night. Sandy MacLeod, not guilty. Mickey MacLeod, guilty. Two months later to the day, Mickey got sentenced to hang.
That’s where the lawyer becomes even more important to the story, see. He was a real legal scholar. At the appeal he completely shot the Crown’s case out of the water, showing how witnesses had been bought with promises of leniency. The appeals judge overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial. At the second trial, which began October 16 and ended on November first, MacLeod was acquitted, after the jury had been out nine hours. Now the cops were furious. But by that point everybody’s attention was on the war.
When his conviction got quashed, Mickey was still awaiting trial on the unrelated matter of hijacking the booze truck. On that one he was convicted and stayed convicted and got sent down to Kingston for fourteen years. Halfway through the sentence, though, Mickey goes over the wall along with two other cons. There were suspicions they got help from some of the guards. There was an enquiry. The second of the three went his own way and was recaptured.Mickey and the third one beat a straight line back to Windsor, where they pulled off a bank heist for forty thousand in getaway money—a very big haul in those days, let me tell you—and made it across the bridge to disappear in Detroit.
Now very few men have ever busted out of KP and lived to keep quiet about it. Mickey was a hard case all right but sometimes you get a grudging admiration for people that tough, even though you kind of hate yourself for it. Years went by and word filtered back up to Canada through official channels that the decomposing body of the fellow Mickey had escaped with had been discovered in a swamp somewhere in Mississippi. I think it was probably true. Everybody’s priorities had changed by then. The force and the Crown, I think, were happy to believe that Mickey must have died there too. Myself, I’ve always wondered if Mickey didn’t kill his travelling companion himself, the way a guy I once read about back in history somewhere killed his own dogs to keep them from fouling up his getaway.
Today he’d be a very old man like me and we know how bloody likely that is, even for somebody that probably spent almost half his life taking it easy in Mexico, drinking those bright-coloured drinks and watching young girls come out of the surf.
[Lonnie stopped talking, which was unusual for him, and stayed quiet for a long time. I thought that was the end of what he had to tell me. Then he started back up, like a TV that suddenly comes on again in the middle of the night.]
Snaketown’s economy was what you would call diversified. Hostesses. Smuggling—goods and sometimes people. Boiler rooms selling penny mining shares over the phone.Bucket shops selling stocks in companies that didn’t even exist. Peddling gold bricks made out of lead to sucker lists of Citizens (there was a good trade in sucker lists). And yeah, dope too, though not like in your generation. And of course gambling, which included laying off bets. By the time I’m talking about, during the war and right after, there was so much legitimate money being coined on both sides of the river making vehicles for the army and then cars for the vets coming back that earning it the other way was never more of a cinch. There was so much money that the river stopped existing in a way. Or maybe it became a river of money and not just water, with two currents, you see, one flowing up and down and the other straight across from bank to bank.
[I inherited my love of language from Lonnie.]
For a while, Detroit took over from Chicago as the centre of gambling in the whole of America. This was before there was much of anything in Las Vegas except gophers and guys with lariat ties. Runners all over the country phoned their bets to the bookies that phoned them to Detroit where somebody else phoned them to Windsor or just carried them across the border. Getting into Canada was a snap, especially by taxi or bus. Going the other way was harder, so many Windsor cabs had Michigan plates to make it easier. Anyway, Windsor was where the risk was spread around. As far as gamblers were concerned, Windsor and not London was the insurance capital of Canada. The people in Detroit, they did all their accounting in Windsor. Snaketown was kind of the back office of the Circus over in Detroit, which appointed the Mayor of Snaketown, you remember him.
[I reminded Lonnie of the time he took me along when he went to talk about building the sauna for the jockeys.Remembering, his face took on a little smile that showed off the weak circle around his mouth, where his dentures were.]
Mr. S was a Greek named Nick Soumakis or, for some reason, Nick the Drum. Some said that this was because he used to be a musician. Believe me, he never played in no jazz band, though I guess he hired a lot of them in his day, for all those different nightspots he ran at one time or another, on one side of the river or the other: the Rounders’, the Egyptian, the Club Intime.
The Soumakis family was big in the coal oil business. This is back when a lot of people used coal oil in their homes. Old people in East Windsor said they could remember him working for his father, driving a horse-drawn wagon with a big tank on the back. Personally, I can’t picture it, but this is what reputable people sometimes told me. Of course, reputable people will say anything that makes them seem more important than they are. Me, I was always happy just to be a handyman. That way I got to observe stuff. That way I could study history when none of the participants were watching.
Today all you read about in the papers is this Free Trade deal. Brian Ef Mulroney didn’t invent Free Trade, the Mayor did. He moved back and forth across the border as easy as the wind and snow. I think it started when he realized there was no future in coal oil any more and gradually took over the family business and changed it into a vending machine company. He called on little places of business and asked them to take one of his machines, selling soda pop or cigarettes or what have you. At first the owner would get it for free and get a percentage of the money that went into the machine. Later he’d have to lease it. Mr. S would come around every so often, collect the coins in a big canvas sack with a hasp and a combination lock, and restock the machine. Then he’d send the store owner a cheque. He took in cash—silver is what I’m saying—but he’d only pay out cheques. You can see the possibilities. Of course, in time he had quite a few machines and a number of people working for him.
Later he got into the business of actually leasing slot machines. This proved even more lucrative. This was at about the time that the Windsor cops got a brand new paddy wagon, a really big deal in the papers at the time, proof that the cops was keeping a lid on crime, arresting so many criminals that they needed to take them away by the wagonload. Of course, this was all nonsense. The raids on gambling joints and sporting houses were either a stunt or a question of an overdue payment, or maybe one of S’s enemies putting in the word. For the big guy naturally made a lot of enemies as he made money and branched out from machines into his own clubs and other things, if what I heard was true, getting people on the assembly lines to peddle dope to their co-workers. A lot of coloured people came up north to Detroit to get assembly line jobs, you see.
Anyway, when the city bought its paddy wagon, S bought his own armoured car. It didn’t have writing on it but you knew right away that’s what it was. You could tell by how it was custom-built: a big square vehicle with an armour-plated cab and an armour-plated cube with slits in it. He was tired of people, people from Detroit I guess, holding up his collectors coming back with the heavy bags of silver, though usually of course it wasn’t only the bags they were after but the master keys. So S had everything brought to the armoured car and dropped through a slot. It all stayed locked up there overnight, usually inside a guarded building or in a parking lot behind a chain-link fence with lights shining on it. People that deal in cash don’t trust banks very much. Your grandmother used to get a kick out of me saying that we kept our savings in the Bank of Maxwell House.
[At this point I couldn’t tell if the look of pleasure in Lonnie’s eyes came from remembering his wife in one of her good periods or general reflection about the old days. They had both vanished, but there were plenty of mementoes around. By this time he had moved into a room in the former Dempster Fireproof Hotel, the last of the old places still standing after they tore down the Prince Eddy in ′78. He’d known the Dempster in his youth as one of the locations where play took place. Now almost all the other buildings around it were gone. After being a hostel used by the social work agencies, the Dempster was turned into assisted housing for seniors. The halls smelled a bit of that disinfectant that comes in big plastic barrels. The clerk at the front desk sat behind a protective mesh screen, maybe a nod to the old days, maybe not.]
As a person who never said much but always kept his ears open, the way a good historian is supposed to do, I heard two different versions of what happened next. One is that the Eyetalians in Detroit got serious about trying to take over S’s play by sending thugs into places of business to bust up the machines with ten-pound sledgehammers and once or twice tipping off Customs about dope coming across the border. The other is that S was the aggressor and used Cappy Smith and other people to make inroads in Detroit. The end result was the Dynamite Wars. You know about the Dynamite Wars, don’t you?
[He wasn’t expecting a direct answer.]
The Mayor of S-town was basically a pacifist who just wanted to make money and play Santa Claus at the Egyptian Supper Club in Detroit or someplace over on this side, where he was known for the generosity he showed to everyone on his name day—it’s a Greek thing. The Egyptian came after the Rounders’ and continued to be his main office even after he got into racing. One night somebody put a dozen sticks of dynamite stolen from some mine in Northern Ontario up against the side of the building. They didn’t go off. A few nights later somebody in a Packard threw dynamite at the front of the building, but the young Cappy Smith saw it rolling along the pavement and pulled out the fuse. He was handsomely rewarded for that act of bravery, I’ll tell you. The moral of course being it’s not only who you know, it’s being in the right place at the right time. The Border Cities Star later ran a story saying that the dynamiter with the bad luck was someone the Detroit Eyetalians had paid to be let out of the Michigan State Penitentiary at Jackson to do the job. As there was no record of his leave of absence, he had the perfect alibi if asked.
[Lonnie still called it the Border Cities Star right up to the end almost.]
Well, soon there was dynamiting right back. There was a big blast and the whole front of a nightspot in the Circus just fell out into the street like a slice of wedding cake. This kind of occurrence went on for a while. There was a lot of sympathy for Mr. S in Snaketown and other places because people thought he was trying to keep the Yanks out of here. Americans were coming over to little Windsor to pull robberies. A pair of them pretending to be architects got the blueprints of the biggest jewellery store in Windsor and somehow got a key made to let themselves in. They got away with eight hundred rings and diamond watches plus a lot of the stuff that people had brought in to have repaired. The newspapers didn’t know this was a poach job and blamed organized crime in Windsor. S was furious and got into a shouting match with the editor of the Border Cities Star. It ended when S’s phone suddenly went dead after he shot it. This was out of character, for he was a pacifist like I say, but he was upset.
Cappy Smith was sent to investigate, a dangerous assignment. Cappy found out the stuff had been sold to a fence in Cleveland for twenty thousand. The fence, who later deceased, sold the stuff to Cappy for twenty-five if Cappy promised not to rat him out. Cappy then resold it to a couple of brothers who owned a small hotel in Toronto. Cappy told S about the original fence but let the story end there. But I think S found out pretty quick. At one time, they’d been like father and son. One time when Cappy was in trouble in the States, S, as a matter of civic pride you might say, put the arm on the various local people to come up with the money to get him out of the jam. But now bad blood broke out between them.
S didn’t want any hustling at his spots. He was looking for gamblers, not boozers. He run maybe a dozen guys out of his places that he thought were lining up customers to stick them up. At some point during an evening, a client would go to his car for more money. The dumb guys would rob the client on the way back. The smarter ones would wait until he was in the game again and then break into the car or better yet steal it. The car, minus the loot, would always be found a few days later in the woods somewhere, run off the road.
S’s first wife died of natural causes under mysterious circumstances. This was in the early days. A friend of your grandmother’s found the body. She told me how it looked, and it didn’t sound normal to me. People don’t normally bleed all to death after accidentally cutting themselves with a knife in the bedroom. For some reason, they had to send the corpse all the way to Toronto for an autopsy by the chief coroner himself, but no legal trouble came out of it. In fact, nobody heard or read any more about it. About the time Canada went to war against Germany, S married a second time. People said she was a singer at one of his supper clubs. Some even said she’d sung at the Imperial Room in Toronto, though I find that hard to believe. Maybe she sang in Detroit somewhere at one time, I don’t really know. It wasn’t the sort of thing you asked them about. She was named Lucille and she wore stoles with the foxes’ heads on one end and the little fox paws at the other, as was the fashion at the time. She tried to become a member of Society but the Citizens of Windsor with the dough wouldn’t let her squeeze in. She’d do things like hear about a high school that needed new gym equipment and then donate it all, only to have it refused. So she decided to go to the other side of the river and spend her way in over there. This turned out to be an important development in history because it sort of laid the groundwork for the end of the Dynamite Wars and the great bargain that S and the Eyetalians worked out together.
The Ss decided to buy a place in Palmer Woods, one of the suburbs favoured by the big business cheeses in Detroit, the sort of people that belong to clubs, if you know what I mean. Mr. S must have spent a fortune on this shack. There was this enormous driveway and room for half a dozen cars in the garage next to it. Upstairs over the garage were servants’ quarters, though S didn’t use them for that purpose. That was where the bodyguards lived. In the main house, there were three bathrooms on the main floor and two on the second. I remember that. The master bedroom was huge, with big cedar closets you could stand in and swing around with your arms stretched out all the way. The furniture and all the dining stuff was really classy merchandise. There were paintings. I mean paintings. There were vases. The lady of the house pronounced the word so it rhymed with Roz’s. I know all this because for a while I had sort of free run of the place. It started with one of S’s middle-of-the-night phone calls.
I went down to his place of business to meet him, and he tells me about the plans for their second home and the renovations that Mrs. S was already having done. He offered me a job, the biggest I ever had from him and the most dough too. “Workmen are crawling all over the house doing this and that,” he says, “and I don’t really know who all these guys are really working for.” He gave me a glance as if he was letting me in on a secret, or a worry. Which I guess it was. “I’d like to hire you to inspect all the work these fellows are doing, make sure they’re using the best materials, doing everything legal—and doing whatever my wife wants done.” I nodded. “It could take months,” he tells me. “But while you’re doing all that, I want you to watch and make sure the place isn’t being wired up or anything.” I felt like saying: But I’m no electrician, I don’t know anything about stuff like that. Instead I nodded again. This was always the best policy. So I spent the better part of one fall and winter going back and forth between Snaketown and Palmer Woods. It didn’t take long but it was like driving all night in order to reach the morning, and the other way around.
[You can tell how much Lonnie loved to talk. I think it was his substitute for work once he got old, though maybe he was like that when he was younger too. As much as he loved yakking, though, he didn’t have the energy to go on for hours—not near the end anyway. So I have to piece his conversations together to make sense of em. When he got wound up, he always came back to the subject of this Cappy character, like he did this next time.]
Cappy Smith had a young brother named Pete. He may still be alive for all I know. He wasn’t all that much younger but couldn’t have been more different. They started getting into trouble together when they were kids, pulling off some petty robberies, smuggling a little contraband. Nothing very elaborate, but Pete was clumsy and was always getting them caught. I won’t tell you who told me this. As a historian I need to protect my sources even though they’ve all gone to their reward by now. Or maybe in some cases there was a reward out on them and somebody claimed it. The story is that Cappy selected a safe in an insurance office for them to blow and made the mistake of giving in to Pete’s whining about never getting anything important to do because he was the kid brother. So Cappy let him plan the job. It starts out with the two of them driving through Windsor with a painter’s ladder sticking out the back window by four or five feet. Nothing suspicious about that!
Somehow they get to the alley that runs behind the building. But right where they want to climb is near a corner and there’s a street lamp shining on them. Pete’s so stupid he’s carrying a piece when all they’re trying to do is to break into a joint at night. In fact, he’s so stupid he takes out his piece like he’s going to shoot out the light. Cappy stops him just in time. First Pete and then the two of them are picking up stones and rocks and pieces of paving brick and trying to put the light out that way. Pete makes a lot of noise getting the ladder out of the automobile, and then it isn’t long enough to reach the top of the pole. In fact, it’s not long enough to reach the flat roof at the back of the building, where they know there’s a skylight that looks down on the offices they’re after. Pete stands there like an idiot, not knowing what to do. Cappy finally backs the heap up to the right spot and they set the ladder on the hood, which gives them just enough length for one of them to very carefully climb up while the other holds the foot of the ladder and keeps it from sliding off the car. What a pair of dummkopfs.
Pete gets up to the top and Cappy sends him up a canvas bag of tools on a line. The line isn’t heavy enough to support Cappy, so Pete decides to do the job himself while Cappy’s the lookout. Pete makes a hell of a lot of noise breaking through the skylight because he didn’t have the sense to tape the glass up before smashing it. Cappy’s getting pretty nervous about now, as I understand it. Pete drops down inside the office—and turns on the lights! Cappy’s yelling at him as loud as you can yell in a whisper to turn off the damn light switch, but his brother doesn’t hear him.
Pete finds the safe. It’s just one of those old iron boxes with a flat front. He tries to pry it open with a crowbar but of course gets nowhere. So then he takes his sledgehammer and starts trying to knock off the knob. He thought it was going to be easier than it was. He has one stick of dynamite, which he attaches to the safe with turn after turn of friction tape, using about a mile of the stuff. That’s not enough, of course, and anyway he places it all wrong and all he manages to do is to break the top hinge on the door—which still won’t open.
Now there’s been this explosion in the middle of the night. Cappy’s yelling for his brother to get the hell out of there or he’s going to leave him behind. Pete hears this and starts yelling back. What a scene. Pete has the line wound round the safe and is trying to pull it on its casters over to where the skylight is. What he would have done with it if he’d managed to move it, I’m not sure. But as the thing weighs maybe three hundred pounds it doesn’t move very far. He gives up in the nick of time, makes a pile of some furniture to climb on and gets back out through the skylight, cutting himself pretty bad on the broken glass and leaving all his tools behind.
They’re both still young men at the time, in their twenties maybe, and they’ve made a lot of dough, relatively speaking, for young fellows. Cappy later says: “Okay, I’ve had enough of this. You almost got us sent to Kingston. Hell, they may get us yet. Your tools are back there, your blood’s all over the place. You weren’t even wearing gloves, you crazy bastard. Here’s the choice you got to make: either go the States and disappear and never come back here again or else let’s do an even split on what we’ve got so far and you go become a Citizen, go sell Hoover vacuum cleaners or something, anything, but stay out of Snaketown and quit the Life for good and keep your mouth shut forever. This is a one-time-only choice, good for the next two hours. You decide.” They don’t speak after that. They don’t see each other.
Cappy builds a house for his family in a nice nondescript part of the city, surrounded by Citizens. The place looks just like everybody else’s. Frame house, wooden porch, two dormer windows on the second storey, et cetera et cetera. The only difference is he gets me to build him a room right in the centre of the basement that has no doors or windows leading to the outside, kind of a stronghold. I make it out of cinder blocks with that phony stone facing on them. Two sets of walls, floor to ceiling, with twenty-four inches of air between them, which I fill with poured concrete after putting up reinforcing rod both ways, up and down and across. There’s one vent running to the bushes outside the house, so you can’t see it. The pipe’s got a plumber’s elbow on the other end with a screw cap. The whole thing’s filled with sand so nobody can drop a bomb or tear gas inside it but so Cappy can get air by unscrewing the cap and letting the sand fall out by gravity. The whole thing rests right on the foundation. It’s got a little steel door that you have to stoop to go through or you’ll hit your head. The door has the hinges on the inside. It wasn’t exactly the hardest job I ever did but it was one of the strangest.
[Lonnie was getting tired. I could tell by his voice but I could tell by his eyes too. I guess he wasn’t seeing the past as clear as he did when he was really feeling up, early in the mornings, “feeling chipper” is how he would have put it. I guess the voice box took orders from the eyeballs.]
“Mama,” I said, “do you work in a cathouse like the kids say?”
She paused thoughtfully. I think she’d been expecting the question for years and was relieved to finally have it out in the open.
She sat me down.
“We prefer to call them homes of prostitution” is how she began.
She continued at the checkout counter as long as I can remember. I’ve never heard of a hooker with a minimumwage day job before. I guess she wasn’t very successful. I was raised by Lonnie and Paulette until I was old enough to go out on my own. Lonnie and Paulette, that’s all I ever called em, never Grandfather and Grandmother.
“You know what’s been tragic in my life?” Lonnie asked me once. I thought he was going to talk about my mother, but instead he says: “I never figured out how to have fun. When I was little, I never learned how to play with the other kids. When I tried they just wouldn’t have anything to do with me except use me as a punching bag. Once, they tied me up to a tree and left me there. This has left me with a fear of trees. So I never knew how to have fun when I grew up either. I’m not saying that I didn’t have pleasure sometimes. Everybody gets a little pleasure to break up the monotony of the pain. The pleasure’s mostly when you’re young, the pain mostly when you’re old. And I’m not saying that I didn’t get into my share of interesting trouble. I’m just saying that I never had anybody to teach me, so I never learned.”
I knew there was a moral here, but I was afraid to ask what it was.
“Your grandmother was a smart woman. She read a lot of books. She had an education and yet she was always trying to make herself even better. She said to me once that I was like the first map of someplace after the explorers discovered it. There was stuff marked on the seacoast and a little bit more a few miles in, but the centre was empty.”
I knew that Lonnie liked jazz when he was young. Deetroit was a pretty good jazz town. It was the Swing Era. Not the sort of jazz that anybody likes now. In the bottom of one of his dresser drawers he had a photograph that Paul Whiteman had autographed to him with a fountain pen when he was playing one time in Deetroit. I remember seeing it once when I was going through his dresser looking for money. Whiteman was a fat bald guy with more chins than he needed and a thin little moustache that looked drawn on.He looked a bit like Hardy of Laurel and Hardy, the fat one, not the skinny one. Lonnie liked that era. His favourite movies when they came up on television were The Glenn Miller Story with Jimmy Stewart and The Benny Goodman Story with Steve Allen. He also liked a terrible movie about a trumpet player played by Jack Webb, the world’s absolute worst actor until Jack Palance. But it wasn’t just this awful white jazz that he cared about. He had a thing for Louie Armstrong and a lot of black musicians popular at the time. I guess all of us always remember the music that was popular when we were a certain age. It was just his bad luck to be that age at that particular time.
Once, when I was still living with Mama, he said he was going to take me to the Imperial Room in Toronto to hear Nat King Cole. I got all excited about taking a trip with him. I was excited at the destination, I wasn’t particularly excited at the thought of Nat King Cole from television, except that I’ll never forget it because we actually got to meet him. Lonnie was done up in his best outfit (he had two suits, maybe three absolute max), with lapels so wide and shoulders so big that I was embarrassed, though even I could tell this had been good stuff when it was new. We took the train, four hours or so sitting in coach, and got into Union Station and then had to walk around a long time before going to the Imperial Room even though it was right across the street from the terminal. Toronto seemed big but pretty dead to me. No obvious play. Young as I was, I made it to be a place full of Citizens. The head waiter did a weird little flicker at how Lonnie was dressed, but that was all.
Lonnie had written out a note to Nat King Cole and bribed somebody to take it back to him, like he bribed em to let me in the place at all. After the show, another guy came by where we were sitting and said that Mr. Cole would be happy to see us for a minute. We were shown back into the dressing room, which was pretty posh but pretty small, with a mirror surrounded by light bulbs, just like you see in old movies. Nat King Cole shook Lonnie’s hands. I saw Lonnie’s note on the top of the makeup table. Lonnie said how big a fan he was and then introduced me. Nat King Cole shook my hand. He had taken off his tuxedo jacket and had a white towel around his neck that made his face look even blacker and more beautiful. He asked if we were from Toron-to. That’s how he pronounced it. Lonnie told him we were from Windsor, across from Deetroit. “Toron-to’s my favourite city,” Nat King Cole said. “This is the only room I play where I don’t have to come in through the kitchen. That’s because the Duke broke the colour barrier here years ago.” He didn’t say this with any bitterness. He just said it matter of fact. Lonnie told me afterwards: “The Duke. Duke Ellington.”
I thought I was marrying a real lulu. Oh, she was a looker back then. You’d never know it later but she looked like June Allyson in The Glenn Miller Story, only better. A sweet girl but sort of a pout-look on her face all the time. That was before the war. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I guess neither of us did. One good thing, though. I didn’t know she was a late sleeper. She drank back then but it wasn’t a problem. Can you imagine that?
I’d be reading the paper. [Lonnie never read anything but the Windsor Star and the Daily Racing Form. She went through a lot of novels but they got trashier and trashier.] I’d always say, “Good morning, dear. You’re looking chipper.”
“You can’t talk that way about the dead.”
[You see, by this time, she was starting to lose to the booze.]
“I’ll talk any way I please. It’s my damn apartment. I’m just glad we don’t have her around here any more, always getting in the road. She’d come here and stay and bring a cross to hang up over the bed. It used to give me the creeps.”
“She had good sense, too. Warned me you’d never amount to anything and she was right as rain.”
“Now we’re getting back to that again, are we? I don’t see you making much progress either, you know. No, all you do is bitch about other people.”
“I’m—only—doing—it—to—help—us—make—something—of—ourselves—before—it’s—too—late.”
“It wasn’t me that wanted this life. Not by myself.”
“You just won’t pull us up and now you’re too old. We’re both too old, goddam you. Look at you. You dress like a bum.”
“I’m a working man.”
“You’re more than a body can stand.”
[I’m recalling this as well as I can. I remember that the phone rang again and they both tried to grab it but she won the wrestling match and he went back to his paper while she cleared her throat and put on what she must have thought was a classy manner.]
“Yes, it is … This is his wife. Oh yes, that will be fine. Thank you. Goodbye.” Then: “That was the doctor’s secretary. She said she’s confirming your appointment for Friday in case you forget.”
“I remember.”
“Well, at least you’re getting out all the time, going to work, going to the doctor. A woman gets the heebie-jeebies stuck here all the time. Everything’s always the same, nothing ever changes. You leave in the morning and come back at night, or leave at night and come back in the morning, doing God knows what. Christ, I don’t even need a clock in this place.” [She threw their clock to the floor, smashing it in a big explosion of springs and gears. I remember that clearly.] “It doesn’t matter what time it is.”
[There was silence until her voice crackled again, like squelch on a radio.]
“You know the difference between you and me.”
“Surprise me.”
“I don’t want to be something I’m not, because I was properly brought up to begin with. I don’t make out like I’m somebody I’m not.”
“You mean I don’t have any spunk.”
“You don’t. We never even came close to getting out of this place.”
“You wouldn’t be in the damn apartment so much if you didn’t drink until you fell down in it.”
“I don’t just mean the apartment. This place. This area. I grew up in this area too, but—really.”
“At least I don’t—pretend—to be anyplace but where I am, in Snaketown, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. I don’t mean I don’t want things to be better. But I don’t go around making believe. Besides, I like it here. This is a pretty good burg. You can get whatever you need here. It’s been pretty good to us.”
“That’s the stupidest lie you’ve ever told.”
[I could go on and on describing the bickering, to use one of their old-fashioned words that I love so much.]
“You don’t listen to a goddam word I say. I want something better than this. I want the kind of life I’m entitled to. Something different. Come back to earth, why don’t you?”
“Me come down to earth? See, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you if you’d open up your ears. You’re the one who won’t sit tight. It’s not the place I’m talking about now.”
[In my memory, he went back to reading the paper.]
“They say it’s going to get colder than a gravedigger’s ass out there today,” Lonnie said.
“Your family was no jewel either, you know.”
“I wasn’t talking about your family.”
“And he wasn’t a gravedigger, he was a mortician.”
“He was a sharpie.”
“Don’t you talk about my father like that. Accuse yourself if you want to call somebody that. You and your friends.”
[Then it would be her turn to go on for a while. I found the language fascinating.]
“He wasn’t any dummy, I’ll tell you that. He built up a business. He warned me against you too, didn’t he? He told me you’d never amount to anything and he was right, God rest his soul.”
“You were the one that gave up.”
“I didn’t give up anything.”
“You passed out.”
“You bored me to sleep, you bastard. The same goddam round robin all the time, it never stops. How many years has it been, I forget, and you know why? Because they’re all the same.”
[This I remember because the phone rang in the middle of it. The phone, one of those old black jobs with the big clear plastic dial on the front, rang all the time.]
“Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s all right. We can talk. It’s all set, then, right? What time is he coming in? Okey-dokey. Well, the thing gives me the willies, but don’t worry about me. Nothing can go wrong, eh? He says he’s probably good for the jake. The jake—the cash. Yeah, that’s right. Okay, I’ll see you down there. That’s right. I’ll be there. Yessir. So long.”
“I bet I know who that was,” my grandmother said.
“He’s okay. He’s a good egg. Fact is, he’s a great man. And he’s always been better to you than you have to him.”
[At that point Lonnie stood up on a chair in the middle of the kitchen and felt for some hiding place in the wall. He took down an object wrapped in old cloth and uncovered it. I knew what it would be. It was a very old handgun. He got his coat, stuffed the gun inside and hid the wrappings, which looked like a shroud after the grave robber’s left.]
“I’m going now.” [There was no answer from the other room.] “I don’t know when I’ll be through.”
[He took me with him but I had to stay in the car.]
You see, I didn’t quite appreciate it at the time but thinking back on it later I see that Lonnie talked to me in a different language from what he used talking to people his own age. Makes sense, I guess. With me, he was the historian, passing along his stories. With them, he was the carpenter who was either happy-go-lucky—one of his favourite ways of describing someone—or anyway willing to please all the time. I suppose he was clinically depressed most of his life, but we didn’t think in those terms back where I came from, not in those days at least. (God—that sounded like his ghost was speaking through me.) Even the simplest conversation could be in a kind of code without ever getting to be more than simple talk. Even before I went to live with him and Paulette, he used to read the weekend funnies to me from the Toronto Star Weekly (I should have added that to the list of his favourite reading materials—they had the best funny papers). When I was living in their place, he used to let me follow him around, be his helper on jobs, buy me Cokes when he went to have a drink. He tried to do his own drinking away from Paulette. I used to think this was because he was afraid of having another fight with her, but now I see he was trying not to encourage her any more than he had to, not that she needed much encouragement. Lonnie even took me to his old barbershop where men got shaves with hot towels and the works. That’s illegal now in Ontario cause everybody’s afraid of getting blood all over himself. I’m sort of glad he didn’t live to see this part of downtown culture get outlawed too. So much already destroyed. I’m not sure he could have stood it.
“How you doin, gents?” he’d say when we went in.
“What do you know, Lonnie?” someone would ask back.
“Can’t complain, can’t complain. What’s the use of it, eh? How’s the missus?”
“Not bad. Yours?”
This was like the catechism of the barbershop. Everybody knew the answers and the questions.
He’d laugh a sad laugh, happy-go-lucky, at the last bit. “Well, she’s a real piece of machinery, let me tell you. One minute everything’s hunky-dory …”
I’m not kidding. This is how these people talked.
A customer to the barber: “Remember to give me high up over the ears, will you?”
Lonnie to the barber: “How’s business been?”
Barber answers back: “It hasn’t. Not so you’d notice. Nobody wants a haircut any more. They want their hair styled.” Everybody would laugh. “It’s like that old joke. ‘What’s the difference between a haircut and a hair style? About five bucks.’”
This was a real thigh-slapper, another of Lonnie’s pet expressions preserved from his young days.
“You know,” the barber was saying, “I was hoping to give the shop to my son one day. You know my boy, eh? Yeah, well, he wants no part of it. He’s still going to school. Says he’s going to get a degree in philosophy. I tell him, ‘What are you going to do, open a philosophy shop?’ He’d be better at this, you know what I mean? Customers are all young kids now anyway.”
Everyone seemed to be looking at me.
“That’s because the rest of us are going bald,” Lonnie said. “Them combs get sharper and sharper.”
The barber ignored him. “They want to go to some other young kid with tight pants and his shirt open down to here to get their hair styled. You understand what I’m saying? They even got girls cutting their hair now.”
“Well, you’re keeping busy,” Lonnie would say. “That’s the main thing.”
“I wish I was.”
The guy in the chair said, “Every time I come in here, you’re sitting in the chair reading the paper or something.”
“Except on Saturday,” the barber said. “Saturday’s still not too bad.”
“Well, you got your health,” Lonnie said, still all happy-go-lucky. “That’s the important thing. If you got your health, you’ve got everything. Don’t matter how much money you have if you don’t have your health.”
“You could be E.P. Bloody Taylor.”
“Yeah, you got your health,” Lonnie said. “I only wish I could say the same.”
“You feeling a bit under the weather there, sport?”
“I got this problem, see. Had it all my life, I guess, but I never knew anything about it until they made me take this checkup. I’ve got some pills for it. And the tests! I take so many tests it feels like I’m back in school.”
“You were never very good in school,” said the guy in the chair. Then to the barber: “Him and me were the dumbest kids in the place.”
“We did our share of horsing around, though, didn’t we?”
The guy getting his haircut laughed. “You remember Old Man Ridgeway? He was this big hulk of a man, see. Had a jaw like a sack of sugar. He used to say, ‘Lad, I’ll drive you so far into the deck it’ll take two Mack trucks to pull you out again.’”
“Course, he had to be tough. That was a tough bunch back in those days.”
“Sure was. You remember the Eyetalian named Smith. What was his name?”
“They called him Cappy.” Lonnie volunteered the information but I could tell he was being careful about what else he might say.
“Christ, I haven’t thought of him in years. Jesus, Ridgeway used to get on his back and he’d just give as good as he got.”
“Remember he went around with his hand all wrapped up for so long?” Lonnie held up one paw like it was injured.
“His hand?”
“Cappy and his girlfriend—I think it must have been the Calder girl …”
“Helen Calder,” the customer explained to the barber. “She was this real fast number. They say she did more things than a penknife.”
Lonnie became the historian once more. “Cappy and her were walking up Woodward one Saturday night by the Loew’s. A guy was up on a ladder, changing the words on the marquee. You know them big glass letters they used to have? Well, the guy’s taking down letters that say Clark Gable and putting up ones that say Gary Cooper or something. Cappy and the girl walk by underneath and stop to smooch. The guy on the ladder hollers at them to get the hell away and Cap begins hollering back at him. ‘Get away from here, you little bastard,’ the guy on the ladder says. And Cappy just tips the ladder over. The guy comes crashing down, glass letters breaking all around them. Made one hell of a crash. Cappy got cut up pretty bad. That’s why he went around with his mitt all bandaged.”
The others were listening very carefully, so he added a punchline, softly. “Wasn’t his gun hand, though.”
The guy in the chair wanted to know what happened to the fellow on the ladder.
“Oh, I think he was hurt pretty bad.”
“Did Cappy get in trouble with the cops for that one?” The barber addressing the historian.
“For a little while, until he got into the real money.”
“When you’re rich you can get away with anything.”
“In this burg, you have to be able to get away with anything to get rich.”
This made all the heads nod up and down.
Then all these guys would sort of wander away from the point they’d all agreed on, and Lonnie would lose the chair as historian.
“What you do think about the Leafs?” the barber might ask.
“They say Mahovlich is still on his streak, but I don’t know. I hope so.”
“I put my money on Little Davey Keon. He’s small but you never seen a kid skate like that.”
“That’s what they say, that’s what they say all right.”
“Course, they’re not the Leafs of the old days. Remember them? The Kid Line. Charlie Conacher, right wing, Busher Jackson, left wing, Joe what’s his name at centre.”
“Primeau. Joe Primeau.”
Lonnie said that from behind the newspaper he’d picked up. All this talk was getting close to treason in a Red Wings town. “Says here that the city has said go ahead on that plaza they want to build. Says it’s a great deal for the community. What a bunch of malarkey. Politicians trying to buffalo everybody while lining their own pockets as usual. They’re as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.” There was a pause. “What’s a plaza going to do to your business here, do you think?”
“I’ll tell you it isn’t going to help any, that’s for sure. A thing like that just drives people away from the street. I’ve seen it happen.”
The guy was almost finished getting his haircut.
The barber said, “Lonnie, do you remember when me and you used to get higher than a kite on a couple of bottles of beer? You can do that when you’re young. We used to paint the town red, the two of us, didn’t we?”
“We’d wake up in the morning in Snaketown sick as a dog. I was saying this to the wife just this morning: horseplay is one thing but, Jesus, sooner or later you got to, well, take responsibility. You know what I mean, of course.”
“What’s all that about?”
“We’re all getting older.”
“Ain’t it the truth.”
“It hit me again all of a sudden just a minute ago when we were talking: I know somebody who’s been dead more than thirty years.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody.”
But Lonnie was one of the last people to see him alive.
By this time Lonnie was in such a hurry to get all decrepit that he got me to come with him. I was supposed to ask the doctor what the patient forgot to ask. That was my job. I had to make sure the doctor explained in English that the patient and me could understand. I was the witness. The job of historian had been passed to me.
“Mr. Bischoff, is it?”
“That’s right.”
“You were Dr. White’s patient?”
“I was. At least I was until he moved to the States. I guess you people do a lot better down there, eh? That’s what I read.”
“Dr. White has given up his practice here, yes. I have his records but they seem to be incomplete.”
Lonnie looked over at an almost life-size plastic skeleton hanging in the corner. “I guess he didn’t make it, eh, Doc?” There was what you could call a clammy silence. “Must be left over from Dr. White.”
“Now about your childhood …”
“I was a kid during the Depression, you see. Funny in a way. My old man came over from Germany because it was pretty rough over there.”
“Childhood diseases, Mr. Bischoff. Have you ever had the mumps …?”
“At my stage of life, does that really matter?” But he could read the doctor’s face and figured out that it did. He understood, one history buff to another. “Nope.”
“Chicken pox?”
“Nope.”
“Scarlet fever?”
“Naw.”
“Rheumatic fever?”
“Is that like rheumatism?”
“No, rheumatic fever. It’s a disease in children and adolescents that weakens the heart.”
“No, not that.”
“But you do suffer from rheumatism?”
“No.”
“What profession are you in, Mr. Bischoff? Do you work a lot out of doors?”
Lonnie tried to hide his hands, hide how rough-looking they were. “When I worked, I worked inside mostly. I’m a finishing carpenter and general handyman, but I’m pretty much retired now. That is, I’m self-employed but I’m not getting much work any longer. You know how it is.”
Apparently the doctor did not in fact know how it is. Big surprise.
“I guess I talk too much,” Lonnie said.
“Well, Mr. Bischoff, talk is mainly what we’re here for today. I’m trying to see all of Dr. White’s patients who are on continuing medication. How are you finding the nitroglycerine spray?”
“It works great, I guess.”
“You’re not finding your normal activities too strenuous? And you’re taking the Pravacal as prescribed?”
“You bet.”
“How about at home? You’re not experiencing any side effects or any difficulties at night?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re following the diet Dr. White suggested for you?”
“To tell the truth, I have fallen down a bit there. It’s kind of hard in my—situation—to stick to the rules all the time. But I do the best I can.”
“You really should try to follow the diet to the letter, Mr. Bischoff. Avoid fried foods, prepared foods of all kinds and red meats and of course monitor your cholesterol and fat intakes very closely. Are you getting proper rest?”
“That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, Doc. It’s not exactly a rest home round there, if you follow me.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I’ve been married as many years as you are old.”
“Go on.”
“And my wife’s sicker than I am. We used to be able to take care of one another but I’m not sure how much longer that can go on.”
“What is your wife’s medical problem?”
“She’s being treated for cancer, Doc. And she has conniption fits. She’s always had a terrible temper.”
“Has she been under psychiatric care as well as treatment for her cancer?”
“No, never has. Wouldn’t hear of it. But she flies off the handle at the drop of a pin, when she has the strength. Of course, she’s been a terrible drinking woman almost as long as I can remember.”
“Has your wife ever been diagnosed as an alcoholic?”
“No, ma’am, she’s not an alcoholic. I wouldn’t say that. But she does put it away pretty good. That’s not really what the matter is, though.”
“If you feel your wife needs counselling, perhaps she should see a colleague of mine. Referrals to a specialist are the usual custom in cases like this. I know a very good woman in the field.”
“You think she’s a kook or something? No, that’s not it. She’s not crazy. She just acts crazy all the time. Since she’s been sick, I look back on them days as the good times. When she gets real mad, I know she’s having a good day.”
I worried if I should butt in at this point but I didn’t know what words to use.
“Is she subject to hallucinations?” the doctor asked, moving back in her chair.
“I just mean she’s not happy most of the time,” Lonnie said.
“The same can be said for many of us, Mr. Bischoff.” She seemed totally straight when she said this, didn’t know how flat she sounded. She wasn’t one of those people whose intentions you can read. Unlike Lonnie, who was worried and nervous and wouldn’t shut up.
“I mean she goes on the warpath, busting up the place and everything. When she gets in one of her spells, there’s hell to pay.”
“And she behaves this way when she’s been drinking?”
“When she’s drinking I know there’s a bad one coming for sure. But, I dunno, the last couple years that’s not been a guarantee. It used to be, when we were first married, she’d drink gin. Her mother told me once that the old man liked that too. In recent years, though, she’s taken to Seagram’s.”
The doctor looked blank. Professional and all that but she didn’t want to get involved.
“It does sound as though your wife has a problem in addition to her medical condition.”
“I’m sort of getting ahead of myself here. All that, what I just told you, that was a long time ago. She doesn’t drink so much any more. She’ll only keep a little bit in the place at one time. It’s not her drinking that makes a difference. She was always what you could call a moody person. She’d always blow hot and cold whether she was hitting the bottle or not. But there was always some kind of rhyme and reason to it. When the kid here was small and she was cooped up all the time looking after him, then she’d really go at it at night. She’d let go at anybody, come to think of it. But she’s not that moody any more. Not good and bad. Just sick mostly. That’s the only mood she’s got.”
“I see. Well, I think you’ll find, with most people, that we reach a time of diminishing expectations. We get to an age where we realize that we haven’t accomplished many of the goals we set out to achieve when we were younger.” This doctor wasn’t all that much older than me. “It can be a peaceful time. But for some people it can be a very disturbing one too. But I’m not really the person you should be speaking with about this.”
“You’re the only person I’ve got to talk to about it, ma’am.”
“No, you just believe I am. There are specialists trained in dealing with situations of this sort, both from your point of view and your wife’s.”
“A specialist isn’t going to do the trick, ma’am. I know what the matter is. It’s me. This is kind of tough for an old guy to say, but I’ve let her down in life. I’ve been letting her down a long while, each year a bit more.”
“This bears on my point. I’m in family practice but that just refers to treating the medical needs of all the members of the family. It sounds to me as though you and your wife need a specialist trained in relationship difficulties. Of course, her present medical condition may make this difficult …”
“It’s me, I’m the problem. Somebody told me once I was a romantic. You know what that means?”
“Of course.”
“It means I go off half-cocked. It means I think I can go through life pretending things are a lot more interesting than they really are. The fellow explained it to me like this. He said I go round acting like I’m in a story in some magazine. That I think there’s a plot, like on a TV show. You know what I mean? For years I got her believing it too, just because that’s the way I acted. For me it was sort of good practice. I’m getting old, Doc, but most of the time I don’t let it get me down. Like I said a minute ago, I haven’t amounted to much but I knew that anyway. Being a romantic like this was how I got by. Now that I’m really getting to be an old man I’m not so bothered by it. I still got that other side of me.”
The doctor was getting restless listening to all this. I was too but that’s because I’d heard it all before.
“I used to think she was just like me. Let me tell you, when we were younger we had some pretty good times together. I thought we were sort of like twins. Then it all went haywire somewhere. For a long time I thought she was stringing along with me, but the last few years I seen it the way it really was. I went on being old Lonnie, everybody’s pal with his tool box, and she started seeing things the way they really are. She don’t like me being one of the boys with other people. She thought that was just our thing, the two of us. She learned something else too. She saw me putting it on all the time and I guess she figured that I’d been putting it on all these years. She sort of got the idea that I’d tricked her or something. Or that what we had wasn’t real. Hell’s fire, I don’t know what she thought was going on. But I see now we probably shouldn’t have stayed together all this time when none of us knew what the other one was thinking.”
The doctor looked kind of thoughtful, I would say. I guess that was all she could do in the circumstances.
“I can sympathize with the difficulties in your home life, Mr. Bischoff. But my concern is with how they affect your physical health. I must repeat that I’m a family practitioner. For this sort of situation you might wish to see a therapist who’s specifically trained to help you.”
The session didn’t last much longer.
What happened next is that Paulette died and Lonnie gave up the apartment—I helped him move, what a day that was—and took a room at the Dempster. Hard as this was to believe to look at it, the dump had been, like I already said, one of the glories of his youth: the scene of much play. Now Lonnie was alone. I spent as much time with him as I could, learning to be the next historian. Lonnie would talk about her a lot. He told me that in her last years she would phone the Vets taxi dispatcher every day to get him to send a cab to the LCBO to get her a pint of Seagram’s Gold. Never a quart, always a pint. Cost nine dollars. I guess she couldn’t trust herself with any more than that at a time. But when Christmas came up that year, she’d got the taxi to bring her two pints or three—one for each day the liquor store would be closed.
All the drivers knew her. So it eventually dawned on the dispatcher that she’d stopped calling one morning. That’s how small a town Windsor really is. He tried phoning and got no answer. Nobody knew where Lonnie was. He was spending a few hours with the boys because he needed to get away from the pressure of taking care of her. She slept most of the time anyway, he said. Finally the dispatcher called the cops. They had to break in. They didn’t find her in bed though but laying in the middle of the room. There was a little food on the table and the television was on. The idea was that she dropped dead of heart failure, which everyone thought was Lonnie’s territory.
Not long after the funeral is when he moved to the Dempster Fireproof Hotel, and soon he was too sick himself to leave. In fact, he was too sick to go down to the lobby that he told me used to be so elegant back in the old days.
We got only a couple of hundred dollars, which ain’t even gas money, but of course that’s not the point: this wasn’t about the cash. It was about the master plan, and that was unfolding exactly as it was supposed to and according to my timetable. If I say so myself, I showed my genius by stealing a stolen car from the guy who stole it originally, so he couldn’t report. Now I dumped the car by parking in front of a hydrant. Let tickets pile up a couple of days. Then, before they tow it to impound, the cops will check the plates and see it’s stolen, then tow it to impound anyway but for different reasons. You know what the traffic situation in Vancouver is like. This ought to give us maybe three days to excape, maybe more. I disposed of the car at