Milwaukee Noir

by Tim Hennessy

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction

  PART I: SCHLEMIELS & SCHLIMAZELS

  Runoff

  Valerie Laken

  Downer Woods

  3rd Street Waltz

  Matthew J. Prigge

  Westown

  Summerfest ’76

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Murray Hill

  Cousins

  Jennifer Morales

  Silver City

  All Dressed in Red

  Vida Cross

  Franklin Heights

  PART II: SWEET MISERY BLUES

  Friendship

  Jane Hamilton

  Ogden Avenue

  Transit Complaint Box

  Frank Wheeler Jr.

  Midtown

  There’s a Riot Goin’ On

  Derrick Harriell

  Sherman Park

  Mocking Season

  Christi Clancy

  Whitefish Bay

  Two Cents

  Shauna Singh Baldwin

  East Town

  PART III: WHAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS

  Night Clerk

  Larry Watson

  Yankee Hill

  The Clem

  James E. Causey

  Lincoln Creek

  The Neighbor

  Nick Petrie

  West Allis

  Wonderland

  Mary Thorson

  Cambridge Woods

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  For my mom Karen and my sister Lori.

  In memory of my grandmother Dolores Biemann

  and my dad Ed Hennessy.

  And for Carrie and Jack, with love.

  INTRODUCTION

  Disturbing Reverberations

  A few years ago, an ad campaign featured Wisconsin native Willem Dafoe sitting in a Greyhound station, in front of him two buses: one departing for New York, the other for Milwaukee. His destiny hanging in the balance, he tells us: “Life boils down to a series of choices. Before long, the choices you make and the ones you don’t become you.”

  Dafoe’s vampiric, underfed gremlin face is transposed on a regretful, hardworking wrinkled old man cleaning up after circus animals, while overhead his confident, athletic composite swings on the trapeze. The voice-over is damning.

  “Whether you’re good enough, strong enough. All choices lead you somewhere.” Be that a CEO flying in on a private plane, a bored, pencil-pushing shop foreman, a chess champion outthinking his opponent, or a sumo wrestler. It’s a minute and a half doubling down on an infamous throwaway joke Dafoe made about himself and Houdini. Both shared the same hometown, and their greatest escape was leaving Wisconsin.

  Poking fun at the stoic simplemindedness, the gleeful love Midwesterners have for low-paying, blue-collar existences because we’re too practical to make bold choices. Dafoe’s ad presents the problem facing Midwesterners: how do you move into the future and hold onto what you love about the past?

  When you grow up in or around the city once known as “The Machine Shop of the World,” the expectation isn’t that you’d have the wherewithal for creative pursuits. I didn’t grow up knowing any writers. Teachers, machinists, insurance salesmen, store clerks, office workers, greenkeepers, civil servants; but not writers. People did that somewhere else. Our stories weren’t important enough. We were too bland. Few books take place in Milwaukee, and from the time I could read I gravitated toward any faint mention of Milwaukee or Wisconsin in pop culture. Turns out Milwaukee has more of a literary legacy than imagined.

  Robert Bloch’s family moved here from Chicago in 1929, and he lived here until 1953. An avid reader at a young age, Bloch bought copies of Weird Tales from local tobacco and magazine stores with his hard-won allowance. He fell in love with the pulp and wrote a fan letter to H.P. Lovecraft, with whom he struck up a regular correspondence. Lovecraft encouraged Bloch to write and introduced him to a circle of pulp authors who would go on to shape contemporary fiction. Bloch lived on Brady Street above Glorioso’s deli during that time. He began publishing regularly and worked writing ad copy until he got a job as a speechwriter for future mayor Carl Zeidler’s campaign. It wasn’t until he and his wife moved from the city to a small northwestern Wisconsin town that he wrote Psycho, inspired by events in nearby Plainfield.

  Fredric Brown worked as a proofreader and typesetter for the Milwaukee Journal. Among his odd jobs, Brown copy-edited pulp magazines, which led him to submit his work because in his mind, he couldn’t do any worse than what he was editing. A heavy drinker, his career grew slowly as he ground out science fiction and mystery paperbacks to keep the bill collectors at bay.

  Before he became a major force in publishing and entwined himself in pop culture, Robert Beck, better known as Iceberg Slim, grew up here. Disturbing reverberations of the themes in Beck’s work can still be felt in Milwaukee today, as it’s known nationally as a major hub for sex trafficking. While here, he became enamored with street life despite his mother’s efforts to educate and raise him in a middle-class lifestyle. Beck’s writing career didn’t start until after a stint in jail, but years of hustling on the streets of Milwaukee and in much of the Rust Belt provided the backdrop for his books.

  One of the authors who was a gateway into crime fiction for me was John D. MacDonald, the prolific detective story and thriller writer who died in St. Mary’s Hospital. He came here for a heart bypass surgery and is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery. A legendary writer who didn’t reside here while alive, but now spends eternity in the glacial clay soil of Milwaukee, coincidentally in the same cemetery as Dolores Biemann, my grandmother—a woman who appreciated great crime fiction.

  Milwaukee is also the hometown of crime writer and Academy Award winner John Ridley, as well as crime/horror legend Peter Straub, whose formative years here left such a deep impact that they continue to haunt his work. Millhaven, Straub’s stand-in for Milwaukee, is the kind of place where a character wonders, What happened to the Millhaven where a guy could go out for a beer an’ bratwurst without stumbling over a severed head?

  Straub’s industrial city rampant with crime proved the inspirational fodder for Nick Cave’s song “Do You Love Me? (Part 2)” and more directly “The Curse of Millhaven.”

  And it’s small and it’s mean and it’s cold

  But if you come around just as the sun goes down

  You can watch the whole thing turn to gold . . .

  That’s as accurate a description as you’re likely to find. Milwaukee, like so many cities in the Rust Belt, built its identity as a home to manufacturers, a growing immigrant community, and booze. Over the last half-century, as jobs disappeared so did the dreams that came with them. The chance to make an honest living eroded the blue-collar families’ quest for upward mobility.

  Presently, Milwaukee is going through a renaissance—abandoned factories being converted to condos, craft breweries and distilleries pushing out corner taverns—yet at the same time it is among the most segregated and impoverished big cities in the country. The gentrification of neighborhoods outside of downtown bear the impact of twentieth-century redlining efforts, forcing residents out due to housing demand, adding fuel to the affordable-housing crisis. Such an environment and atmosphere make excellent fodder for noir fiction—an outlook out of step with the romanticized nostalgia that Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley created of Milwaukee.

  Near the end of Willem Dafoe’s ad, he boards a bus headed for New York. “Bold choices take you w
here you need to be.” In a recent interview, Dafoe explained that the path he took led him to Milwaukee, where he studied and performed with other passionate, supportive performers. Living in Milwaukee exposed him to diversity and different social classes outside of his experience. It lit a fire in him.

  The book you’re holding is the first of its kind—a short fiction collection about Milwaukee, by writers who’ve experienced life here. The crime/noir genre at its best can be one of the purest forms of social commentary. I’ve gathered contributors who can tell not just a fine story, but who can write about the struggles and resilience of the people who live here. Maybe you picked up this book because you recognized an author’s name, like Jane Hamilton or Reed Farrel Coleman. You’ll also find Matthew J. Prigge and Jennifer Morales, among others, whose stories you won’t soon forget. Or maybe you were intrigued by the word Milwaukee in the title. Whatever the reason, I’m honored to compile a body of work that represents what I love, and fear, about Milwaukee. I love my city’s lack of pretension; its stubbornness and pride in the unpolished corners. I fear that my city faces an uncertain future­—that as it becomes more divided it may push our best and brightest to find somewhere else to shine.

  Tim Hennessy

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  February 2019

  PART I

  Schlemiels & Schlimazels

  RUNOFF

  by Valerie Laken

  Downer Woods

  We shouldn’t have been there in the first place. That’s the problem with telling you anything real. We should have been tucked into soft little beds, dreaming of algebra or homecoming or whatever. We shouldn’t have been creeping through the sewers under your city. I know that much. We shouldn’t have been hunched up like rodents, sweeping our flashlights along the damp, scratchy walls, trying not to hit our heads while we searched for those metal rungs that lead up to manholes. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about your real sewer system, Mr. Mayor, that deep channel of shitty dishwater that flows down to Jones Island and fills up Lake Michigan. I’m talking about the old spiderweb of pipes that runs closer to the surface, under the East Side. Maybe you don’t even know it exists, but we do. Me, Diego, and JJ, we drop down into it at night, because some of those manholes don’t open onto streets or alleys like you’d expect—they open up into the garages of people like you. And people like you store all kinds of pawnable shit in your garages—so much that you forget you ever even had it. I bet nine out of ten people we hit don’t even know they’ve been robbed. So how bad am I really supposed to feel about it?

  Friday night, the three of us wormed our way through the tunnels for at least a half hour before we found anyplace new. We try to be careful. We leave spare lights hanging like torches at forks in the pipelines, and we stay together, in boots and gloves, and I trust these guys, Diego and JJ, they look out for me like I’m their sister. A cousin, at least. But that night, I started losing my bearings down there, I got all wobbly and sick, like maybe the tunnel was a throat that could tighten and swallow us. Trailing last, I stopped to get a grip and let some air open up between me and Diego. He’s a big guy, heavy and slow, and the whole backside of him nearly blocked my view of the route ahead, so I shone my light backward, to where we had been, and I was about to break down and beg them to turn back when finally JJ stopped and said, “Shazam.” He found one.

  If a manhole opens onto the world, and you press your face up to its little finger holes, you can see the glow of streetlights and hear cars rolling over. If it opens into a building, though, you get nothing but dark silence, like we got then. So JJ heaved open the lid and shoved it aside with a loud scrape, and we waited. When we first started doing this, that part used to scare me, till JJ explained: “If you were sitting around your garage at night—and why would you, when you have a whole house right there—you’d have the lights on, right? And we’d see those lights, and we wouldn’t go up. But let’s say for whatever reason you are sitting around in your old, cold garage with the lights off, and you hear this heavy scrape in the floor, and whoa, look, here’s three sewer rats climbing up out of nowhere?”

  I like picturing it, the look somebody like you might get on your face seeing us. Before you could even find your voice or the light switch, we’d have closed up that porthole and scrambled, disappeared. JJ said, “Nobody with a house like that would ever follow us down these holes.” So, we figured the risks were slim.

  Anyway, this garage, like all the other dark ones, was empty of people, and goddamn, it was a good one. Not just a garage, but a big old carriage house, they call it, with three cars and a snowblower and some kind of chicken coop thing up in the middle of the ceiling, with four little windows up there letting in street light. All the walls were lined with hooks and shelves, sagging under the weight of a thousand hardly used tools. Drills and drill bits, wrench sets, saws. A brand-new Bosch nail gun. More than we could carry, for sure, so we started picking through them, thinking gold mine, when suddenly a nasty scraping sound and a whimper rose up from the back corner of the room. Good God.

  Diego and JJ killed their flashlights, but I was closer to that noise, and my light went straight to it. So I saw.

  “Girl!” JJ whispered at me, and I turned my flashlight against my jeans to dim it.

  Fast as rats, Diego and JJ scrambled back down that hole, gone. But I stood there like some dumb, frozen homeowner staring through the blue glow at that thing in the cage. I even stepped closer. It was curled up and twisting its face toward me, searching left and right under its blindfold. And I saw it was a man.

  The cement floors of those old garages slope down toward the hole to drain, and as I backed away from that rattling cage, I trusted the slant of that floor to lead me back down where I belonged.

  Once I was in the pipeline again, I wrestled the heavy lid back into place over my head. But Diego and JJ’s lights were nowhere around.

  “You guys!” I hissed, panicking. Then off to my left, half a block away, they turned on their lights and burst out laughing.

  “Come on!” they called out, waving.

  When I reached them, Diego said, “What the hell was that?” But I have to admit I just shoved them forward. I had to get out of there.

  * * *

  JJ’s contact, Tommy, was having a party that night, some weird situation in a house near campus where everyone was wearing pajamas for no reason I could figure out. They were all older than us, in college, but they looked like little kids cleaned up for bed, holding their red Solos to their faces like sippy cups. JJ pointed at Tommy’s bunny slippers and said, “Should I read you a fuckin’ story, man?”

  “You smell like swamp,” Tommy responded, but once we took off our boots and coats, he let us in.

  We went upstairs to his bedroom, where we traded him what we’d found for a bag of pills and forty dollars. None of us had the right ID to pawn things.

  “You look kinda spooked, Lucy,” Tommy said to me. He had shaggy hair and a slanting, tweaked-out smile that I liked but knew not to trust.

  “She’s fine,” JJ said.

  “She’s always fine.” Diego threw a hamhock arm over my shoulders. I felt like a can being crushed in his armpit, but I waited a few secs before pulling away.

  “I guess I got a chill,” was all I said.

  “You see something down there?” Tommy asked.

  JJ had already told us not to talk about it. Down in the tunnels, that made sense. I was too spooked to stick around and try to argue with him in the dark. But now that we were aboveground, the regular rules of life trickled back to me, and my brain kept playing a video of that guy, tied up and contorted, blindfolded, gagged, straining to figure out what kind of monster was making the noises we had made. I’d seen dogs in cages bigger than that.

  “Let’s go downstairs and drink some beers,” JJ said, end of discussion. Down in the front room, the stereo was blasting Kanye, and more kids in slippers and flannel pants had arrived and were dancing and stumbling around like d
rugged monkeys. While JJ made his rounds with the pills, Diego and I sat slumped on the broken-down couch for a while, just watching.

  I was tired, and Diego said, “Man, I could go for a sandwich.”

  The college kids made a point of ignoring us. After a while, Diego passed out, and I waited till no one was noticing me and went back upstairs and took a shower. My skin was still cold, like a slab of meat stinging when the hot water hit it. Then I put my dirty clothes back on, with my underwear inside out.

  On the staircase, a girl with pigtails and a teddy bear reached out to touch my wet hair, like it was some kind of new fashion statement she might want to copy. Diego and JJ were nowhere—they must have left. Aside from some boys playing cards in the kitchen, most people were slowing down. I let one of Tommy’s housemates mack on me until he passed out, so I could sleep in his bed.

  The trick about crashing with people for free is not to bug them when they’re sleeping and to get out of their sight before they open their eyes. I failed on both counts, flopping around all night with terrible dreams. The guy in the cage kept rattling back to me. Wherever I went in dreamland, there was his body, curled up, knees to armpits, wrists tied to ankles. And it was bad enough if he lay still and I thought he was dead, but then he would squirm, and I’d jolt back, thinking, Do something, Lucy. Do something.

  So at dawn when I should have been sneaking out, I was just getting trapped in the black tar of sleep. I was too slow, and Tommy’s housemate woke up groggy and gave me a squeeze. In his T-shirt and straining boxers he took a good look at me, and I braced myself, but he just said, “Jesus, how old are you, anyway?” So I scattered.

  Luckily, my boots and coat were still on the porch, though cold and stiff. It was drizzling outside, like the air itself was wet. I walked down Kenwood in the hard gray light to the nasty apartment building on Oakland where lately JJ’d been camping out in the basement. I found him curled up on an old crib mattress behind some boxes in the boiler room, his long bony ankles sticking out of some Hello Kitty pants he must’ve taken off someone at the party. I squeezed his grubby sock and waited, squeezed again.