by Neal Pollack
A drunk's mood is a delicate thing, and Bobby's, as he righted himself from his fall, was no longer cheerful. Darkening, he turned to face the grinning monkey head. Always overeager at the plate—and elsewhere, too, some of the girls on the block muttered— Bobby swung again, this time harder, again falling and again landing his swing on the Ford's ornamental grill, more of it now in the street around him than on the Ford.
With difficulty, he picked himself up, and the foreign tribe of boys, back from some skirmish, set their bikes down and cautiously, as Bobby still had the bat, joined the loose circle of men around him.
When Bobby Pando looked from boy to man to boy to man, Perryman looked with him and saw faces made even more passive and blank by the intensity of their curiosity about what might happen next. Bobby turned from them to what was left of the rubber monkey's head, and looking into that face, pondering those oogly eyes and that ear-to-ear grin, appeared to be attempting to stick a finger in and take the temperature of the depths of some unfathomable confusion, perhaps his life.
There was just so much time a drunk needed to reflect on confusion, and Bobby, lunging sideways, took another cut, a good one, not at the monkey, but at the inner ring of boys. They easily danced back, swelling with a collective laugh, then settling, their mood now darkened, as they focused on the threat that was Bobby Pando.
But the gyro in Bobby's head had gone all topsy. It spun him and he went down hard, bat skittering free with a diminishing sound, a clank, clank, clank of aluminum on asphalt that drew the outer circle of men closer together. If they wished they could have reached out and grasped each other's hands.
Perryman checked his watch. It was close to 10:30, and Bobby, flat on the street, groped through shards of his ornamental grill and glass from his headlamp for the bat. Right then is when Perryman heard, and men standing around him later confirmed, a kind of hissing sound. The sound came from Bobby Pando. Some men said later, when they tried to explain, that it sounded almost like a song. "It undulated," one fellow offered, "sort of like a song."
Bobby tried to right himself. He was just beginning to assemble the complicated series of activities that would eventually, if accomplished in the correct sequence, enable him to stand, when a meaty kid, larger than the rest, evidently starting from down the block because by the time he reached Bobby he was traveling that fast, drove his bike over Bobby Pando. It was quick. A thumpthump as the bike passed over Bobby's back. And the song? Then everyone heard it. To Perryman, it sounded uncomplicated as death might turn out to be, just a quickly diminishing gush as something sang itself free from Bobby Pando's chest.
Panfish and Stevie B. assisted Bobby into his van, and Panfish slid into the driver's seat to squeal away, not with anger or urgency, but insolence. They peeled off, the monkey's head still in place, its one near-intact oogly eye facing forward.
When it was quiet again, or a city block's equivalent of quiet, the women, first one, then all, gathered their children, folded chairs, and closed coolers. They moved slowly because it was far too hot to move otherwise, but they moved, retreated inside or to screened front porches, and Perryman did, too, a shadowy shape joining other shadowy shapes looking out.
ZERO ZERO DAY
BY KEVIN GUILFOILE
Grand & Racine
The kitchen was small and square and further encroached upon by splintered cabinets and ancient appliances, the latter kept in working order by a combination of the tenant's unusual skills and his hard-to-find tools. The walls of the musty apartment cracked and peeled, but mechanical objects, clocks, lamps, televisions, and especially radios, had been restored like museum pieces among the ruins. Anything not electrical, like walls, bathroom tile, and ceiling paint, remained in a state of ongoing neglect.
—Twenty-two-thirteen.
—Twenty-two-thirteen go ahead.
—Yeah, squad, do you have me logged on?
—Negative. [Pause] Try again now.
—Am I logged on now?
—Ten-four. I'm sending that job again.
—Ten-ninety-nine.
This radio, Kimball Dent's original creation, had been cobbled together from sets abandoned in dumpsters around the city or in his shop downstairs by aborted customers who realized it was cheaper to buy new and better ones than pay to have them fixed. For Kimball, hunched over a late-night bowl of oatmeal in his kitchen, every banal word squawking through the receiver tonight between shrill fits of static was like a cut fastball thrown for a strike in the middle of a perfect game.
—Keeler and [unintelligible] with a [unintelligible].
—Seventeen-thirty-five, I can't understand a word he's saying, his radio's garbled.
— [Unintelligible] Milwaukee and Keeler, stalled car blocking traffic.
—Ten-four.
—Gonna be a red Honda [unintelligible]. Need to order a tow.
His heart beating at an accelerated rate, Kimball seized the scanner with both hands and repositioned it on the table for better reception. He didn't want to miss a single thrilling exchange.
—Can I get an RD for a zero-four-six-zero?
—Your RD is Henry-King-four-zero-four-six-four-three, Henry-King-four-zero-four-six-four-three on event number zero-eightsix-two-five. Zero-eight-six-two-five.
—Ten-four. Thanks.
The old analog clock on his stove read 10:55. If it continued like this for another sixty-five minutes, until midnight, he would be a witness to Chicago history.
—I still can't log on. Hold me down going in for a new PDT.
—One-three-three-five, please call me in the sergeant's office.
The Holy Grail of the police scanner hobbyist.
—Can I get a female for a search?
A Zero-Zero Day.
—Twenty-one-ten.
—Twenty-one-ten, go ahead.
—Anyone know of a Dominick's near Paulina and Ogden with a Western Union [unintelligible] currency exchange?
Last year there had been over 600 homicides and more than 3,000 "aggravated batteries by firearm" within the city limits. The last time Chicago had a Zero-Zero Day, a twenty-four-hour period, midnight to midnight, with no murders and no shootings, was 1999, and as far as Kimball knew there were no witnesses then. No ears listening in on the scanner with an appreciation of the event as it occurred. No one anticipating the countdown to midnight the way he and dozens like him were doing just now.
—Yeah, uh, we were following a youth on a bike that fits the description of a suspect [unintelligible]. We have him on the hood.
—Twenty-one-ten, is that a negative on the Dominick's?
In the middle of the Formica-topped table, on the other side of Kimball's oatmeal but still at arm's length, was an approximation of a laptop Kimball had Frankensteined from computers so obsolete that cash-strapped schools wouldn't even accept them as donations. Scanning enthusiasts from across the country were instant messaging with Chicago hobbyists demanding the latest news on the lack of news, and the conversation scrolled up the screen with the speed of a stock ticker. Curiously, cops and dispatchers weren't even acknowledging the feat over their radios. Maybe they were afraid of jinxing it. Maybe the different shifts and the different districts had no way of comparing notes in real time. Maybe they wouldn't have any idea what had happened until the CPD command staff had their briefing in the morning. It was funny to think the scanning community shared real-time intelligence better than the Chicago PD. That notion made Kimball chuckle. He spat wet cinnamon and oatmeal onto a small auburn oval of mustache and goatee, then rubbed his face with a moistened washcloth he kept on hand for mealtime grooming.
—I just on-viewed a traffic accident at 95th and Pulaski.Hold me down over here and dispatch EMS for me, please, squad.
— [Unintelligible] medic [unintelligible] contact the station.
—Ten-four. Let me know if you need any more help over there.
His phone rang, a lovely clapper-and-drum trill. He allowed those awful digital tones neither in h
is home nor in his shop, where the synthetic tweeting might go on for minutes, unnoticed and unanswered under the din of labor, static, and police dispatcher conversation.
"Hullo?"
"Dent!" It was Jen Colino. In the background, her own scanner, an expensive Radio Shack Pro-96, belched in harmony with the homemade one in Kimball's kitchen. "Amazing, huh? Amazing! Do you think it will hold up?"
"Dunno," Kimball said, now wondering if the cops weren't right to observe a superstitious moratorium on discussion of the ZeroZero in progress. "We'll know in an hour."
"Wanna come over for the finish? I'll open a bottle of champagne at midnight. Like New Year's."
Kimball sighed. He didn't have a girlfriend, hadn't for a long time, and Jen Colino was the only woman availing herself to him currently. They had plenty in common. She was a scannerhead. She was sweet and kind of pretty, maybe a little fleshy around the face and under the arms, but no more than he was. Jen was plenty attractive enough, was his point. But if they became a couple she would be over every night. She would make chicken and they'd track the scanner together but she would want to talk. Constantly. Over the dispatchers. Over the cops. Over the paramedics. Although nearly every one of his friends was, like Jen, a member of the All Chicago Scanner Club, Kimball believed his hobby was a solitary pursuit, and he wasn't ready to give up his bachelor benefits for a warm body on the couch just yet. "No, I don't think so," he said to Jen now. "I don't want to miss anything."
All his life Kimball had chosen paths he could walk by himself. Maybe his parents imprinted that on him when they made him an only child. When he was a boy he loved jigsaw puzzles, and from there it was a small step to taking apart radios and fitting the pieces back together. He liked keeping his own schedule. Answering to no one but his customers, who were in and out of his shop as quickly as it took them to set a television on his counter and get an estimate. The people he felt closest to, the dispatchers he knew by name and the cops he recognized by beat tags, didn't even know he existed.
Kimball cupped his right hand at his temple and leaned against the kitchen window, peering down at a refrigerated truck idling at the four-way stop below. With his eyes he could follow Grand Avenue east all the way to downtown but Racine only as far south as the Metra tracks on the other side of Hubbard. The Italian joint across the street was playing host to its Monday night lasagna regulars and a fleet of Caddies and Lincolns were squeezed into the angled parking spaces in the tiny lot. Along with the bakery and butcher and the storefront men's club down the street, Salerno's was one of the last landmarks of the old neighborhood. There was still an Italian for every yuppie on this thin sliver between the expressway and the meatpacking district, but you couldn't really call it an Italian neighborhood anymore, not like the Polish and Korean blocks up Northwest where hardly anyone spoke English and you had to check with your waiter twice before you put a spoonful of anything in your mouth. There were still a handful of aging or wannabe wiseguys about. A few of them passed the hot days in lawn chairs on the sidewalk in front of the bakery, telling tales of the great Italian migration of the '50s, from Cabrini Green up Grand all the way to Harlem. But in the condo sales brochures and restaurant listings, this neighborhood was River West now, a name as stripped of ethnicity as the realtors could manage.
"I could come over there," Jen offered.
"That's okay," Kimball said. "I mean, I'm kind of tired.
I'm going to bed right after midnight." He added, "Or sooner, if somebody gets capped."
"Oh. Okay." The disappointed silence was interrupted briefly by a unit responding to an alarm at a Clybourn clothing boutique and then continued for thirty seconds or more, as Kimball lingered with one ear pressed against the phone receiver and the other listening for the dispatcher.
Then, the buzzer rang downstairs.
"Someone's at the door, Jen. I gotta go."
"Who would be coming over at this hour?"
Her words were armed with jealousy and Kimball wanted to defuse them. "Could be a customer," he said.
"You shouldn't answer. You'll miss the Zero-Zero."
"I'll call you tomorrow."
"Okay. Call me."
Kimball hung up the phone and walked to the intercom, smudged with greasy fingerprints, next to the apartment door. With some frequency, folks from the neighborhood brought their televisions to Kimball's apartment after-hours. It most often happened on nights of Bulls playoff games. A desperate basketball fan might arrive at his doorstep, TV set cradled in his arms like a sick baby. Kimball tolerated such visits and even encouraged them. His services might not be needed much anymore in the era of disposable electronics, but they valued his skills when appliance stores were closed for the night.
He pressed the button and talked at the beige box in the wall. "Yeah?"
"Kimball?" a voice replied. "Lemme in."
"Who is this?"
"Gerry!"
"Gerry." Kimball repeated.
"It's me. Genuine. My TV in your shop. You gotta let me in."
Genuine Gerry was a neighborhood character of indefinite Central Asian origin. Possibly Kyrgyzstan. Turkmenistan. Tajikistan. One of those. It would be a stretch to call him a neighborhood resident, as he didn't exactly have an address. To get by, Gerry relied on good weather and the generosity of others, and in Chicago the latter was just marginally more reliable than the former.
Story was he had been a Comiskey Park beer vendor. His nickname was from the Miller Genuine Drafts he once poured from his tray. Allegedly he'd been fired over an aggressive response to a drunken fan's insult. Since the spring, he parked cars at a new jazz club around the corner on Ogden, spending the hours from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. in an aluminum and glass box the size of two old fashioned phone booths welded together. His most prized of few possessions was a tiny, eight-inch black-and-white TV, but during the day it wasn't safe in the parking lot booth. By long-standing agreement, when he left his shift, Genuine would hide the television on Kimball's second-story back porch. In the morning, Kimball would retrieve the TV and take it into his shop for safekeeping until 6 o'clock on the nose, right at closing, when Genuine would stop by and retrieve it for the night. Twice Kimball had made minor repairs, once to the antenna and once to the loose knob, without charging Genuine or even mentioning what he had done.
"Yeah, okay," Kimball said. "I'll be right down."
Kimball slipped back into the kitchen to get a quick bead on news coming over the scanner. Nothing going on, just a trespassing call from the University of Chicago library. Gerry leaned on the buzzer three times in annoying succession and Kimball grabbed his keys, spun out the door, and sprinted down the steps.
Genuine was hopping on the sidewalk, arms rigid at his sides, his long, curly black hair, Ace Frehley hair, you know, from KISS, Jen had called it, bouncing around his head. Kimball had seen him high before, although he was never certain what combination of herbs, inhalants, liquors, powders, or pills got Gerry off.
"Let's make this quick, Gerry," Kimball said. "I'm kind of busy."
"Oh yeah, oh yeah," Genuine said. "You have a lady up there? Jennifer?"
"No, man." Kimball said. "Just … stuff. It's late."
"I know. I know. This is the case."
Kimball pegged Gerry at about his own age, forty, and wherever he was from originally his accent didn't sound foreign, exactly. His English was occasionally quirky but always understandable, even in his present state, and his dialect sounded more like a nasally amalgam of Chicagoese and urban slang than it did Middle-Eastern or Russian. His body rigid, Gerry continued to hop like he was underdressed for the cold. But the night air couldn't have been much below seventy.
Kimball pushed aside the padlocked iron cage that stretched across the door to his shop and unlocked two deadbolts and then waved Genuine Gerry inside. Gerry rubbed his hands together and blew on them. "It's right here," Kimball said, walking quickly back to his workbench. He lifted the set by the handle and held it out, but Gerry was looking a
way, his eyes scanning the broken merchandise.
The indoor fluorescent lights were off, but plastic knobs and chrome trim twinkled in streetlight leaking between the iron bars on the window. Hundreds of small appliances lined every wall in the narrow shop. Some were awaiting repair. The ones that had been wiped clean and polished and dusted with compressed air sat near the front of the shop in anticipation of their owners. Many were shells, partially hollow, which Kimball had cannibalized for parts.
Gerry counted the shelves with his finger, one, two, three, four, five, six, all the way up to the ceiling. "You got any of those flat screens in here? Whatyacallem? Plasma TVs?"
"Not today," Kimball said, still holding the television in his outstretched arm. "Sometimes, though. Most of them are under warranty. Repaired by the manufacturer. Occasionally I get one of, uh, dubious origin that needs to be fixed."
"Dubious?"
"Well, I don't know for sure, of course, but when a plasma comes in here I usually suspect it's been stolen."
"Uh-huh. And whaddya do?"
"I fix it. It's none of my business where it came from."
