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And away we go…
I was twenty living in an apartment nicknamed “Sofa City” in Rogers Park, called so because it was filled with sofas, a crazy party crash pad I shared with two other roommates, one still in college with his eye on adult prizes and one in a tailspin just like me.
I found a job down the street at a greasy spoon that served Italian beef sandwiches, gyros, hot dogs, burgers, and steak sandwiches with five arcade games, three pinball games and ten pool tables.
George The Greek ran the joint. His mother owned the building and restaurant, but George ran it and when he wasn't around, a Puerto Rican kid named Mario picked up the slack.
Mario had a baby face and weighed 400 pounds. When we mopped down at night, he was so big and strong, he could bear-hug the Street Fighter arcade game off the ground so I could mop underneath it.
One night around closing, a white Astro Mini-Van pulled up out front. Mario dared me to bang on the side of the van and see what would happen. It's a shitty white mini-van, I thought, he probably wants me to scare his grandmother.
I banged on the side and the door slid open. Three guys inside all pointed guns at me and yelled, "What's up motherfucker!"
This was before cell phones so he couldn't have texted them to let them know I was coming; this was just who they were. Two of the young men in the van were Mario’s cousins Mikey and Omar.
Mikey and Omar would come around after we closed so they could smoke weed, sip 40s and shoot pool while Mario and I mopped up.
They always brought a quiet Dominican kid with them. He was so serious I thought he was twenty. Turned out he was fourteen.
He never smiled so I made it my purpose in life to get him really high and crack enough jokes to get him going. I finally got him to laugh and open up around me and let his guard down.
When he smiled, he finally looked fourteen, even younger, but most of the time, he carried the world in a scowl. In between shots playing pool, I watched Mikey and Omar teach the kid gang signs, slowly luring him in.
The joint was a few doors down from the El train stop so we got college kids, commuters, drunks and vagrants. Everybody came through.
There was a guy named Matt The Turk who acted like a college student to sneak into Loyola University’s computer room across the street.
One day he came in glassy eyed, bragging about being on something called the internet.
“What’s the internet,” I asked?
“You get on it on the computer,” Matt The Turk replied, “I been up for three days straight talking to girls all over the world.”
Matt looked like a hairy troll, so there was no way this thing he was talking about was legit or had cameras.
Despite his looks, Matt had an incredibly boisterous personality and a crazy smile that disarmed most novice human beings. Everybody else knew he was a con man, everybody except his college girlfriend Mandy, but it looked like that was going to change when I saw her barreling in front of the joint putting her finger to her lips like, “Don’t warn Matt I’m coming in.”
I kept my mouth shut as Mandy charged in wearing a bomber jacket, t-shirt, jeans and ox blood Doc Martens. Matt had his elbows on the counter, head in his hands, yapping away.
Mandy slid up behind him and football kicked him in the nuts. Matt’s arms shot out, his chin slammed on the counter and fell straight back on to the floor.
“You cheating piece of shit. Come back to the apartment and I’ll cut your tiny dick off,” Mandy shouted then stormed out.
George ran out from behind the counter clutching the long thin knife used to slice gyros off the cone. He put it right to Matt’s neck and hissed, “All Turks eat Greek dagger.”
That was the day I learned about the internet and not to sit Turks and Greeks next to each other at the wedding.
When I threw parties at sofa city, I invited everybody from the job. Mario would never come. He had a baby girl at home who he adored. His wife also hit him. Matt The Turk was MIA.
George would come through. Sometimes the beat cop would pop by just to playfully fuck with me and bird dog the college girls.
Mikey and Omar would roll through with the Dominican kid too. We had a three-foot purple bong named Astro. The kid and I would take long pulls and chop it up. He confided he was living with his grandmother and was worried about high school.
I shared that I used to live with my grandfather during the week, my grandmother on the weekend, then eventually stayed with my aunt and uncle until I graduated high school. I also told him I just got kicked out of college and might be joining the Marines. Not sure.
Something about our talks felt hopeful.
Then like all good things, Sofa City had to come to an end. We were all moving on, but knew we were not getting our security deposit back, so we threw a party to raise money so we could all find a new apartment.
At the party, a pal named Ryan had three friends from his old neighborhood come by, who were members of a gang called the 8 Balls. They refused to pay the cover, almost jumped me in the hallway, then started shit inside.
They got into it with Mikey and Omar, who came out to see me in the hallway, where I was charging the $5.00 cover which included a balloon for the five-foot nitrous oxide tank hidden in the closet.
Mikey lifted his shirt and showed me his gun.
“Yo, I gotta kill those motherfuckers, but if I do it in your spot, the cops are gonna be all over us for shooting up a party with college kids. Just want to let you know I’m gonna kill ‘em out front.”
“Hold up man,” I said, “Lemme see if I can straighten this out.”
I went in and checked with Ryan, to see if he could calm his friends down. He said they were all on acid and had guns on them.
I saw Omar lift his shirt and secretly hand something off to the kid. This was not gonna be good.
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