“You know, they called me ‘Kid Dynamite’ in my boxing days,” he said, laughing, as he set his beer on the table following a good swig to wash down a bite of pizza.
           ‘Kid’ is ninety-three now, but still speaks with the youthful tenacity he had as a twenty-year old semi-pro in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
            “I had to give it up for a little bit when I hit Korea.  Of course, that’s where I did some of my best fighting.”
            Tell me about that.
            “The boxing, or Korea?”
            Both, eventually, but Korea for now.  Were you scared?
            “Hell yeah, don’t ever let anyone tell you they weren’t.  But when the shit hits the fan, the adrenaline kicks in and you don’t even think about it.”
            Such as when?
            “Oh jeez,” he said, looking at the beer but not really seeing the bottle.    “I remember one time, me and a small company were out on a scouting mission and got attacked by a group of Chinese.  They were there to try to drive us out and keep that peninsula under the control of the communists.
            “But we were there in the middle of the night, they saw our company and they hit us hard.  I was the only one to survive, but I was almost the last to get killed.  I had crawled under a jeep for cover and they were advancing towards it.  There was one of our guys under that jeep, already dead, his head blown open.  I reached out, grabbed some of that gore, you know, blood and brain matter and spread it all over me.   You know, playing dead.  I’m not that good of an actor, but these guys believed it when they looked under that jeep.
            “I mean, I don’t know how they didn’t hear my heart pounding in my chest when I laid there on my stomach with my face in the mud.   But they walked away, satisfied that they had killed everyone.   I stayed under there for two hours, crawled out and walked for two nights to get back to camp.   Hide in the day, walk at night. Our guys were surprised to see me, they thought the “kid” had gotten it like everyone else.”
            Any other close calls like that?
            “Oh hell, yeah.”  His fingers toyed with the square of pizza on his plate, but didn’t lift it.
            “I can’t say that people were initially intimidated by me.  I mean, I was a short-statured guy.  Blond, you’ve seen the pictures.  One hundred and twenty pounds…that’s why I was classified a featherweight in the boxing days.   But the new arrivals were warned.   They’d see me and maybe not think much of me.  But they were told, ‘Hey, “Kid” is your leader, he may not look like much, but don’t f**k with him because he’ll knock you on your ass.’
            “And I had to do it more than once, too.”
            But I’d think that if that kind of reputation gets around, those guys would look up to you and trust you.
            “Oh, yeah.  Tony more than anyone.”  The pizza square got pushed away and a sip of beer followed.  He shook the half-empty bottle for a moment.
            “I’m not supposed to drink this.  Not because of my health or anything.  I’m ninety-three, how can a beer hurt me now?   No, it’s just that Maggie can’t have any and she’d never understand if she saw me sipping at this.”
            Maggie was his second wife, ten years younger and slipping slowly into the ravages of Alzheimers.  The “Kid” was her sole caregiver despite fighting macular degeneration.  This was the second time he had this job, as he had been sole caregiver of his wife of forty-five years when she passed from cancer in 1998.
            I waited to hear about Tony and the story came without any prompting.
            “Tony,” he said.  “He was like nineteen and sought me out the first day he came to camp.  He’d heard that I was going to be heading another scouting group that night and he begged me to take him.  I mean, I really didn’t want to bring him.  He has just gotten there, this was going to be kind of dangerous.  But he kept pushing me and something about the young guy really got to me.  You got to respect him for that, right?  So I gave in.
            “So we went out that night.  Going out was pretty uneventful, we probably hiked out about ten, fifteen miles.
            “But the Chinese had seen us.  Instead of an outright attack on our way back, they set traps.  It turned out that we were crossing a field that had been planted with mines.  And wouldn’t you know it, Tony tripped one.  Probably blew him backwards about ninety feet.   He was still alive, though, we could hear him crying out in the night.  There was no way that I was not going to go out and get him.  The guys gave me cover when I ran out to get him.  I found him pretty quick.   One leg had been blown completely off.  Can you imagine that?  His first day there.  On duty for all of twelve hours and, suddenly, his military career was over.
            “So I grabbed him and slung him over my shoulder and ran back to cover.  I don’t know how I wasn’t killed then, that crossfire was really heavy. But I made it and somehow we got out of there.  Got back to camp and he was whisked away.  If he survived, he was going home.
            “Well, either way, he was going home, you know what I mean?
            “Honestly, we all went home soon after that.  I think this all happened in….May of Fifty-Three, maybe?  And we were out of there by August.    Never thought I’d see that poor guy again.
            “But I did.
            “Not surprising, really, I knew he was from Chicago.  I want to say this was about a year later, maybe less.  By then, I had come home and set up a small pet supply store on the east side.  Did pretty well, it was basically my home away from home.  Didn’t want to stay home with my folks, but that’s another story.
            “So I am there in the store one night.  I worked for and by myself when I first started up.  Then one evening, two guys come into the store.  They’ve got overcoats on, hats, just looking around, but not clearly not looking to buy anything.  They step out as quickly as they came in and I’m thinking, ‘what the hell is all this about?’  I had my .38 with me, under the counter, you know.  I was reaching for it when they came back in.
            “But this time, they were rolling in a guy in a wheelchair.  And it’s Tony.  Recognized him on the spot.  He was doing really well, considering.  I mean, looked healthy.  I think he said he was very close to getting a prosthetic leg.   Well, he’d been looking for me, found my Mom and Dad’s number…they lived in Evergreen Park…called them up and that led them back here to my store on Stony Island.
            ” ‘Hey Kid,’ he says.  ‘My father wants to talk to you, if you don’t mind.  He’s out in the car.’
            “So I go out the front door with them and there’s this big, beautiful Cadillac parked out in front of the store.  I get in the car to meet Tony’s dad.  And I am telling you, I am looking face to face with a guy like Marlon Brando or Paul Sorvino, or James Gandolfini.  You know what I’m talking about.
            “Well, this guy is thanking me profusely for saving his son’s life.  Now, I’ve never been into that hero bullshit, I don’t believe in it.  I ran into that field to get Tony that night because, yeah, he was my responsibility and this is just what we do.  No more than that.  Except for the fact that I should have never let him come with us that night in the first place.  So, yeah, there was that, and don’t think I haven’t forgotten that in the last seventy years.
            “So now, his dad offers me a job in his…business.
            “All I could do is thank him for that offer. . .and of course, thank him respectfully.  I’ve seen plenty of those movies and I knew too well what went on that never made it into those movies.  Again, that’s another story.   I told him that I had a nice business started that was beginning to grow.  Of course, I didn’t tell him that I knew a Polack like me could never get anywhere in his business.  I mean, you can only go so high if you’re not from the same bloodlines as those guys.   And, honestly, his business wasn’t for me.  I mean, it wasn’t in me.
            “And he accepted that.  He shook my hand and gave me a card with a phone number on it, along with instructions for me to call him whenever I needed anything.  I slid out of the car, gave Tony a hug before he slid back into that magnificent car.  It was a rainy night and I watched the car move away down the wet street, those taillights getting smaller and smaller as they melded into the traffic.  Then they were gone.
            “I had that card in my pocket and I figured I’d never use it.
            “Well, I did.

            “I mean, it was a few years later.  I had actually moved locations, set up a new place a little further west, near Marquette Park.  Business was growing.  Now, there was a bar across the street with some apartments in the floors above.  And I could see that some riffraff lived up there.
            “So, one morning, I open the shop, this guy comes in and I seem to recognize him as one of the tenants of that building.  I step into the back room to answer the phone, and when I come out, there’s a note sitting on the cash register that says ‘Leave $30,000 in a bag in the news stand down the street near the diner or we are going to smash up your store.’ 
            Now, first of all, that crap is stupidly amateurish because anyone would know that a small store like mine would never have that kind of cash in the building.  I had a successful store, yeah, but even back then, that kind of money they wanted was the stuff of lotto daydreams.
            “I was just going to ignore it.  I had many threats over the years that never really went anywhere.  But I thought, no, I’m gonna get these guys.  I had the advantage because I knew where they were located.   They didn’t know that.  So the phone rings and it’s that same idiot on the phone.  I act scared, and trust me, acting scared was the most unpleasant part of this whole escapade.  So we set up a “drop” time for 4pm that afternoon.  I guess this neurologist was thinking that the six hour delay would give me all that time to count out the thirty-thousand dollars that I had just ‘laying around’ in hiding places all over the store.  
            So I call the Chicago Police Department.  I told them what was going on, but not to send out a patrol car.  I wanted an unmarked car and I wanted them to park in the back parking lot of the store.
            “Well, they send out a plainclothes guy and the plan is that he’ll be sitting in the diner down the street at the time of this scheduled “heist” . . .I really think these assholes thought they were living a Frank Sinatra movie or something. . .the cop will watch me put the brown paper bag full of cash (ahem, strips of paper) into the news stand.  When the guy comes down to collect, the cop will get him then, because he has to catch the guy in the act in order to prove guilt.
            “So, all goes according to plan.  Sort of.  I make the drop, the cop sees the guy come out of the bar and make his way to the news stand.  At that moment. . .and this could not make this more of a comedy of errors. . .the newspaper truck comes to refill the stand.  The cop sees this happening and jumps out to stop the driver.  At that moment, this amateur criminal stops and freaks out.  He recognizes the cop from some other stupid thing he’s done.  He turns tail and runs.  The extortion plan fails and the pinch isn’t made.
            “About two hours later, I get a call.  It’s “Brains” again and he’s giving me the whole tough guy crap, you know, like ‘you f’d this up, you called the cops.  Now we are gonna trash that place when you least expect it.’ At this point, I gave him a tongue-lashing so foul, I’m surprised that the phones didn’t melt. I slammed the phone back down on the cradle so hard, I half-expected that entire apartment building across the street to jump two feet in the air from the repercussion.
            “Now, what am I going to do?  The cops are out of it at this point, these lobotomy patients are pissed off but probably won’t do anything.  But I know I can’t take that chance, I’ve got a lot of merchandise invested in the place and sitting on those shelves.  Plus live animals.  So I’ve got to do something. I spent two nights sitting in the back of the store in the dark, waiting for something to happen. Well, I knew I couldn’t keep doing that. But knowing they were still up there and I couldn’t touch them. What could I do?
            “Then I remembered that card in my wallet. I made a phone call.
            “And do you know what?  By the end of that week, I don’t think it was three days later…so says the bar’s landlord…apartment 2W was mysteriously cleaned out of all furniture and the security deposit unclaimed.  As if the two guys who lived there suddenly got a great job offer in Mexico and just took off. Well, I know for a fact that those fine boys weren’t in Mexico, but they were, indeed, far far away and had seemingly found Jesus and mended their ways.
           Kid Dynamite took another bite of the pizza and lifted his beer.  “For Tony.  I really hope he’s still alive and doing okay.”  He looked at the beer.  “I really shouldn’t be drinking this, you know.  But what the hell.”
            He finished the beer and dropped the empty into the small garbage bag that I would soon be taking out with me. Destroying the evidence, so to speak.
            And with that, Kid Dynamite went on with another story.