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Just so you know what I mean by Barrens

People tend to visualize this when they think of a country gas station. Not the way it is, at least not here in the Barrens, where r...

Saturday, October 12

 That’s when I started watching. The guys down the fast station said he was a fucking killer. Something in Philly. Just had I got my period, glad I still had it, and I was running, running away,

Sneaked up on him, kinda. Though I did, he had an icepick at my ear before I knew he was there. 

“What you want, missy?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Food. Got anything to eat?”

Okay, okay, okay. What would you do? I moved in. He made me some food. I could see right away he was dangerous. You don’t get scars like that if you’re not. It was a terrible place, the Last Chance Garage. He let me sleep on the floor and he never tried to fuck me. I already had tits but he never tried to fuck me. What kind of a man is that? Gay? Not this guy. Don’t want to tell this snobby weepy story, but he wasn’t there wh en two of them creeped up on me. They had me down, my jeans off, my skivvies.. oh shit!

The way the Pines are. They take the women where and when they find them. It has had happened before, Just not like this. The guys down at the store used to talk about this Johnny Dodge feller like he was some superhero. You know, the guy who killed all the Feds on the MOVE night. I don’t know abou that.

I know what happened that night. Guy had his cock almost inside my cunt. Then, suddenly, he had no head. Four more guys were doing things and they all sudddenly died. I hadn’t been a virgin before, but I all of a sudden felt like one.

“You going to rape me yourself now?”:I asked.

“No,” All he ever  said. 

Did you forget this out yet.? He was Johnny Dodge.






Monday, April 11

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 twelve, your dad is drunk as a skunk, and there’s a punk legend in town?

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.”



Thursday, February 25

Burrowing

 

My flashlight didn’t even reach up to his face.

I didn’t call Joe. He just showed up on his own. I always thought of him in one word. Fat. When he entered the trailer it groaned, and I realized the right word was weight not fat, immense weight, like he was 400 pounds or so. I’d met him before. He lifted a car off a log it had run over. 

“You’re Joe,” I said. “Johnny said I should call if I needed anything. I didn’t call.”

“You didn’t know you needed anything,” he said. He pulled out Johnny’s bar stool and perched on it. I was sure it would break. I didn’t know what tack to take. So I guess I took all of them.

“Let me guess,” I said. “I’m supposed to feel reassured that some old thug friend of The Snakeman stops by to call me girlie and say don’t worry. Sorry. You’re fresh outa luck. I worry about him. I worry about me. And now I’m worrying about you. Who the f**k are you to show up here in the middle of the night when I’m alone with one small dog? Let me guess. You mean well, but you and words aren’t close friends, which is why you don’t have any, not even Johnny, who as far as I know has never even invited you to dinner.” I paused, gasping.

“You done?” he asked. He sighed. It felt like he had let all the air out of the trailer in one heave of lungs.


Saturday, January 30

Never knew he drew that sketch

 Johnny was never what they wanted him to be. I should know. When a man is in position to manipulate and abuse a young girl and he doesn’t, you know. Why he left, why he ran, has nothing whatever to do with me. I’m older now, a lot older, and I have a hell of a story to tell about the One called Johnny Dodge.


 Haven’t even thought of him for years. Went to Philly after he left. Smoked the money he left me in crack. Met a guy who told me he loved me. Put me out to... you know.

Heard today they found him dead. My pimp. Johnny left me this website, plus the money he’d hoped I’d use for a happy life. 

Weird thing. Now I’m back at Johnny’s Last Chance Garage.

And I guess it really IS time to tell you his story.

My Mom’s name was Zsofia

My name is Haidée

 I have a journal. He taught me to keep one. I’m going to read it to him when he gets back. If he gets back. Which I don’t know about.

What happened way back then? Johnny, 30 years ago when he was named Sam, was a loser in Pineville. He escaped to Philly, where he became a gang leader. Not just a leader, the leader of a South Street biker club that killed maybe hundreds of rivals. Then the feds came for him. And he killed them too. ALL of them. How my mother met him. He limped in bleeding from two bullet wounds with a retarded dwarf named Gypsy, also injured, and my mom nursed both of them back to health. Then the feds kill her, Johnny leaves for a couple years, comes back, I’m not ten anymore, and it’s the Barrens, and I do for him, as I would for any Jersey boy.

He tells me he’s not in a gang, he’s just a writer, he shows me poetry. I believe him because I’m just a dumb bitch and I’d use worse words except that he’s still in my head saying no.

Do you understand.? He’s an old guy, late sixties, and he’s missing.and two more recently released child molesters are dead. Can’t be him. Johnny is in his late sixties... but I know he killed them.

It’s him. Dammit. Got so tired of hearing about it at the country store. JohnnyDodge, the Snakeman, the Fast Finisher, the Real King of Punk City. 

S’okay. I want him to keep living. If I have to, I’ll kill you later.


He was a good guy. I’m not even Heidi.


Birth certificate says Haidée, not Heidi. My mother was a fool, taking in Johnny and Gypsy all those years ago. Gypsy’s dead and Johnny’s gone. Mom too. Wish it was different. You don’t know what you have till it’s gone. He was way older than me but I thought of him as my old man and he just thought he was my old man. You know. Different interpretations. I wanted to think he was being loyal to my mother, who took care of him all those years, but it wasn’t that either. It was always her.

When he left he took the Chrysler, the good one, and the truck and a lock of her hair. How I know they didn’t get him. He also put a wad of money in my purse. $100,000 in beat-up hundreds. And a note. “Take care of My Dog Jip. You have what it takes. Be good.”

He took Harry with him, that huge lugubrious hound who always groaned on the couch. Jip missed him. I missed Johnny. I guess we both missed both.

Johnny never said he was there for me. He just was, all the time before he left. My mother always said, “It’s not for us to judge him. He was never even here.” She died because she had that opinion. Not Johnny. The guys in suits who took her away. They found her body in the Barrens. I had to identify her. Johnny was away on “business.”

I had to identify her body. Shot.

He smoothly took over caring for me. Not a great cook but a decent one. Never tried to catch me naked. I was the one who got a thing for him. You know. It was the danger that trailed him. You could smell it.

I took over caring for him and his dogs after my mother died. The big dog, Harry, was very protective, not growly just you know, always between you and him.

He called himself Johnny Dealey. The Old-Timers called him either Sammy or Johnny Dodge like it was one word, JohnnyDodge. 

So after he left I kept on keeping on keeping on. It’s the Barrens. Jip needed me. And that Shuteye Town trailer attracted me.

And now I know more than any of you.










Tuesday, January 5

He’s Gone.

 

Heidi here. I came to walk the dogs. They’re not here. He’s not here. I never told him how much he meant to me. Nobody ever takes care of you. Johnny did. The Fast Finisher. He was that. Just gone in an instant. I kept his secrets. Have to start sharing them now. I know he’s not coming back. I suspect he’s, even now, trying to protect me. But I have the library to look at. He wouldn’t let me look at it. Now he can’t stop me. 

He’s got the dogs. They will be safe. I assume I will also be safe. But here’s what I can show you, the secret I thought I could protect. But I won’t show you the keyboard yet.


Okay. I will. You can’t understand it any more than I could. So how does it matter? He’s gone.


So, okay. He threw them in the wastebasket. Polaroids. Crumpled up. Didn’t want me to find them. How I know they’re important. 


 

Thursday, August 6

Dark Secret


“I guess you’re going to have to kill me too now,” she said. She was pointing inside my bottom drawer.

“Why?” I asked.

Heidi again. “I’ve been reading,” she said. “The whole punk thing. South Street.”

“So?”

She showed me another of her snapshots.


“It’s all a lie,” she said. “St. Nuke never killed the Duke. You did. And there was never any such thing as the Shuteye Train. It was just you. With this icepick.”

“We all looked alike to them,” I explained. “Nuke was badly wounded from the debates. I just did my part.”

“Murder,” she said. “And there never was a band called The Shuteye Train? Right?”

Which is when the night went kind of funny. There was a rumbling. Then a growling. And a barely discernible whisper. Strictly speaking, nothing happened. Only Heidi, in the interim, had peed her pants.

“You’re not really real, are you?” she said. “Any of you.”

“Yes, I am,” I told her. “Real as the day is long.”