(It’s been awhile…I have finally gotten single vision back!)

The Kid cut a piece of the pork chop, laid the knife down and switched the fork to his right hand.          

        “For a guy who…in the old days, of course…was well known for his strong left punch, I am actually right-handed in everything else,” he said.  “Even eating.”  And with that, the slice of pork chop disappeared quickly.

         After a quick sip of the beer to wash it all down, he continued.
         “I’ve got to order pork tenderloin next time.  Easier on my ninety-year old choppers.  After all, pork tenderloin is the same meat as a pork chop, it’s just beaten up a little more.”
         The tavern was quiet, other than the sounds of the prizefight on the lone TV.   George, the proprietor, would normally have a ball game tuned in, but if the Kid came in to eat and watch a prizefight, the Kid was given that perk.    On the screen, two young boxers were dancing around each other in mismatched choreography, occasionally swinging at each other, the gloves cutting through empty space due to a quick dodge of their heads.   Kid shook his head.
         “Bad form.  Where did these guys train?  Certainly not at Johnny Coulon’s place.”
         He knew that the famed southside Chicago gym had been gone for almost fifty years, but that was his benchmark and all else was less.
         “The place is quiet today.”
         “Well, it’s Father’s Day,” I replied.  “People were in the restaurants early for lunch, or they stayed home entirely.   They’re certainly not coming into a tavern to watch a prizefight.”
         “Susan always made a big deal about Fathers Day. And yet, she never really liked going out for Mothers Day,” Kid answered.  “I mean, she gave up Mother’s Day to come with me to visit my mother.  We did that every day until she passed away in ninety-eight.”
         “Your mom?”
         “No, Susan in ninety-eight.  My mother outlived her by two years.  Susan passed at sixty-two, my mother at ninety.  Go figure.”
         “Sounds like Susan was a very giving person.”
         “She was everything.”
         He was quiet for a bit, pushing the meat and vegetables around on his plate.  I said nothing.
         “First time that I laid eyes on her was when she walked into the store I was running.   Pet shop, over on the east side.  She came in to buy some bird seed.   Pretty little brunette.”
         “When was this?”
         “Ohhh…about nineteen fifty-three.     I was twenty-two, just home from Korea.  Trying to make a go of it.  I’d had some problems adjusting, no secret in that.  Today, they call it PTSD, but it really didn’t have a name back then.”
         “What kind of issues, if you don’t mind me asking?”
         “Oh, I’ll tell you some time.  Lots of little things.  Once, I shot the ear off of a thief.  But, that’s a whole other story.”
         I sipped my beer, reveling in how this guy could tell a story, build the suspense and then leave you hanging.  “Fair enough,” I replied.
         “Susan was seventeen at the time.  Boy, she’d been through so much, had fought so many battles of her own.  Grew up in the south, bounced back and forth between Galveston and Jacksonville.  You see, her dad died when she was…oh, about eight…and her mother had…well let’s just say that her mother had some trouble adjusting.  She was sick.  Paranoid.  Maybe a little bit delusional at times.  Susan and her two brothers got the brunt of it.
         “Susan told me that once, in the middle of the night, she woke up smelling something acrid.  She walked downstairs and her mother was hiding behind an upended bed mattress, soaked in kerosene.  In her hand, she had a little cigarette lighter, clicking it, clicking it.  But the spark didn’t ignite, thank God.   When the boys joined her, they asked their mother what was wrong.   Their mother kept saying “they’re coming for us.”   Now, there was no “they”, you understand.   But the boys calmed her down and told her they could move again.”
         “And they wound up here in Chicago,” I volunteered.
         “Lucky for me, I guess.  I should say, lucky for me that they brought the parakeet up here with them.  I guess there had been some disagreements about that, but Susan won and the bird came to Chicago and sooner than later, Susan needed bird seed.”
         “Did you ask her out right away?”
         “Nahhh, I couldn’t quite pull that trigger.  But she came into the store often.  We’d have long conversations right across the counter.   Now again, I remind you.  I had been in some pretty effed up situations in Korea.  I was an active featherweight semi-pro boxer, had been for quite a few years.  But, let me tell you;  asking Susan out to a movie was the scariest thing that I have ever done.  But…I did it!”
         I raised my glass to him.  “Congratulations!”
         He clinked glasses with me, took a sip and placed the glass squarely in the middle of the little cardboard coaster on the table.
         “Well, it didn’t exactly go as planned.”
         “She didn’t stand you up, did she?”
         “Nope, it was almost the other way around.”  He shook his head, almost trying to forget his momentary stupidity of one night seventy years ago.   “Before going to her house that night, I got frightened and went to a bar and had a few too many of these.  Same brand, would you believe?  Old habits die hard.”
         “You made it to her house, right?”
         “Yeah, but I showed up drunk as hell.   I’m not proud of it.  Like I said, I had alot going on in my head.  Going to a psychiatrist was not a socially accepted thing back then, you know?  And if you did, the family had to keep it secret and made you feel like you did something wrong.”
         “We’ve come a long way.”

         “Not far enough,” the Kid lamented.  “You notice how all those state-funded mental health hospitals got closed up some years back?  Where do these poor folks go?   Nowhere.  Left to struggle on their own.  Who knows what private hell they are living?  Why do you think some of them who are really sick do things that are tragic?   I’m all about reasonable gun control to a degree, but it’s a two-sided coin.  Every time something tragic happens that appears on the news, the NRA is like ‘It’s not the guns, it’s a mental health issue.’  Okay, I agree.  Then why aren’t they using that same energy and commitment to lobby for better mental health care?”
         I could only shrug my shoulders, as I agreed with him one hundred percent.
         “I even see it in the younger generation,” he continued.  “How many high school kids have problems today that aren’t being addressed?  We’ve got a local high school that could have easily hired another desperately-needed social worker for the school.  What did the school do?   Spent that money on a nice illuminated logo of their sports mascot for the front of the building.”
         A waitress came to the table and asked if he needed a refill.  He was down to his last quarter of a glass, lifted it, shook it and smiled at the girl, shaking his head.  She smiled and winked at him. This man was a flirt and he knew he did it well.
         “So, back to Susan,” I prompted.  “Did you stand her up?”
         “Nope.  I gathered up the courage…the wrong kind of courage, I guess…and drove over to the apartment where she lived with her mom and two brothers.   Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t have been driving.  But I did.”  He got quiet, shaking his head again, somberly.  “I sometimes wonder at the sight that I made.  They hear a knock on the door and her older brother answers.  I’m thinking he was about twenty-one at the time.  He opens the door and sees me completely blasted.  I don’t know if I reeked, but I was certainly pretty animated.  And slurring words.  Her younger brother kind of peeked around the corner.  The younger brother was maybe fourteen or fifteen.  Their mother was in another room, and looking back on it now, I am glad of that.   “So I tell them who I am and I can just see the disgust on their faces.  So they make me wait outside of the open door and I can hear everything.   They went back and told Susan that I was drunk and that they’d get rid of me if Susan wanted.   But then I heard her voice.
         “She told them, ‘No, it’s okay, I’ll handle it.’
         “This seventeen year old girl who had been through so much.  I don’t know.  But she grabbed her things, her spring coat, her purse and came outside into the evening.   She could have been thoroughly humiliated, I don’t know.  She had every right to be.  But I didn’t see any of that.  We left my car where it was.  She took my arm and we walked.   We walked to a park.  Just talking trivial things.  We found a bench and sat down.  By then, I wasn’t talking trivial anymore.  I was telling her things that I hadn’t ever told anybody.  Stuff that went on overseas.  Stuff that happened at home before I left, you know, those things that told me that going to Korea was a better idea than living at home with a drunk father.    And how much I didn’t want to become like him.
         “I might have cried.  I don’t remember.  All I know is that I was laying on the bench with my head in her lap.  And she was caressing my forehead.  I actually passed out for a little bit.  And she sat there, comforting me for all that time, telling me that I’d be okay, that things would be all right.”
         The Kid paused then, continuing to swirl the remnants of the beer around in the glass.  He did not drink.
         “So we married in ‘fifty-five.   Obviously I cleaned up my act,” he laughed.  “Enough to where her family realized that I wasn’t a monster.   I had opened another pet store, this one in Chicago Lawn, and for awhile, she ran that store while I closed down the one on Stony Island.   We moved into a nice Chicago neighborhood, raised a family.  I retired in ‘ninety-three, we had our grandkids. 
         “Then she was diagnosed with lung cancer in ‘ninety-eight.   She had been a lifelong smoker, although she was cutting down.  But that C just took hold of her and spread through her like a spiderweb.  We did the chemo thing, hoping for a miracle, but she just got weaker and weaker. 
“Towards the end, when we knew there was no hope, she went on hospice.  She didn’t want to be tucked away up in the bedroom, she wanted to be downstairs, on the couch, where she spent so much time reading her favorite books, or talking on the phone with old friends.   And yeah, those old friends came to see her.  There got to be a point where she was glad to see them, surprised to see them, but didn’t know why they were there, or why they looked so sad.  I’d go sit in our TV room, leaving her to her quiet, so she could sleep.  But, more than once, I could hear her talking.   Talking to her dad.  Talking to her mom.  Talking to the one brother who had passed away about twenty years before.   She was even talking babytalk, like she was talking to a little puppy who had been long gone.
         “Well, on the morning of June fifteenth, she kind of settled into a coma.  We had all been keeping vigil, but I sent the kids out to get some food.  And I sat with her there on the couch. 
         “I had her head in my lap.  And I caressed her forehead and whispered to her how she would be okay, how things would be all right.
         “I’d like to think that she heard me, because her last breath was so calm, like every stress she ever had, every bad memory that had ever taken hold in her mind, for as long as she had been keeping them stored up in there…that she was finally able to let them go.
         “All I could think about that she was taking a journey before I could go on board.  And I was watching that ship go out over the horizon and disappear.  But knowing it wasn’t really disappearing, because when it dipped over the horizon out of my view, I knew it was appearing on the horizon on the other side.  Her soul was like strong flame, and I knew that a flame like hers can never burn out.”
         His glass was now empty.
         “You sure you don’t want another one?”
         “Well,” he said, elongating the short word.  “Maybe a ginger ale.  But a small one!”
          When the drinks came, I offered a toast.
         “To Susan.  Sounds like she was quite a girl.”
         Kid Dynamite nodded.
         “She was everything.”