I went looking

I been digging. He left me with nothing but questions. Sicced that big lug on me like I needed him. Don’t. What I need is answers. So I broke into the Shuteye Town Library and started rooting through the file cabinets. They were locked. But I have a crowbar. How else you gonna get back inside when you’re ten and you’re dad is drunk as a skunk?

Found some files. Lordy, did I find some files. Some look too fragile and old and, have to admit too hard to make out, to mess with. Until later, when I have a way to look without damaging them. But there’s a lot of stuff in longhand, diary type stuff, or more like it, just remembering. Like old men write when nothing works anymore and all they can do is remember. Was he really Johnny Dodge? He seems to dance around that sometimes in this more recent stuff. Sometimes yes, sometimes not, depending. You know. But if you read it with a hard eye, like I have right now, sounds like an old Philly mobster pretending things were prettier or less dangerous than they really were.

Here’s one:

“Some nights I leave the bike behind and go walking toward Center City. I knot a blackish kerchief around my head and rub some ash under my eyes to look older. I have an old cotton duster of my granddad’s, not lined, just a rumpled paint-stained sack-looking thing, with some old Redwings on my feet. Nobody bothers me. I don’t look exactly homeless but close, though not anyone you can be confident to mess with.

I like walking up Broad Street, past all the parked cars in the middle, past all the funeral parlors that wait for the slain children of drunks and whores, whose moms will predictably wail when another twig of their intricate family trees is severed by gunfire on this very street, and I can feel the dead leaves of those twigs under my feet as I walk toward the classical magnificence of City Hall, lights gleaming even late late at night, as scoundrels cook their private books in the name of ambition, mistresses, and Cadillacs.

It should be depressing but it isn’t. A lot of the people who live here are dying, but the truth is we are all dying, and this great City, this great machine, is living, humming, blinking, rumbling continuously even at this hour. The city will survive us all. Billy Penn still his famous hard-on silhouetted against the deep blue shotgunned sky. I feel curiously alive, as I rarely do back in Punk City. People say combat makes you feel alive. I don’t feel that way at all. Feeling terrified and feeling alive are very different things. If you can mistake one for the other, your life will not be long. Combat is work, intense, demanding of the senses, and half of what you do will make you satisfied for having survived, not lived, and half will make you feel sick for what you had to do to survive and protect your own. Walking, just walking at night, on the other hand, is a peacemaker.

On this night, as it happens, something did happen to spoil my communion with Philadelphia. A young girl, head half-shaved and bleeding, reeled out of a doorway between two funeral parlors and screamed “Help” as she ran toward me. She collapsed into my arms and my fingers on her ribs as I kept her from falling felt a slash wound just under those ribs, gushing blood. I was easing her to the ground when two big men came out of the same doorway she had and advanced on me. Trash talk, racial epithets, couple knife blades winking under the streetlights, they were warning me off.

I broke an inviolate rule of mine, but I could not let this girl die, and I didn’t want to shed more blood on this night. I held up a hand and said, “Wait. Can I ask you a question?” Something, maybe my absence of fright, calmed them. “What? What’s you question?”

“Have you heard, in your hood, of a stone killer on South Street named Johnny Dodge?”

They both stared at me. “The one with white hair and a wicked stick knife and a bike that don’t even moan?”

They exchanged glances. I was still trying to apply pressure to the girl’s wound. “You ain’t him,” one of them said. They were both 200 lbs plus. But their eyes were wide. The one who hadn’t spoken reached out and whipped off my kerchief. As he did so, I flashed my scriver and nicked my bandanna away from him.

“Fucking Johnny Dodge,” they both said at once. 

‘“Now call an ambulance for her before I make myself have to call for three.” 

They did. This was Broad Street after all. The ambulance was quick, the police were late as usual, and the two nasty boys melted away. I never even learned her name or if she survived. I’d like to think she did.

Ruined my walk. That night anyway. But I didn’t have to kill a soul.”