In Greektown

TGIF!  It had been a tough day. Actually, it had been a tough week.  I couldn’t wait to get into my T-shirt and boxer shorts when I got home, give myself a facial, maybe a mani-pedi.  And I was going to sleep until noon tomorrow.  It was my weekend to be on call, and I prayed I wouldn’t be.

But I wasn’t quite ready to go home yet. I only lived around the corner, so I just needed some time to decompress.  Dugan’s.  It was pretty much “the” cop hangout around here, and I often bumped into familiar faces, from the nearby precincts, and from the office.  Today was no exception.  I’d run into Tom Dewey, Micky Doyle, even Chief Silva.  Stopped and chatted with Louise for a few minutes. 

I looked around the bar, looking for an attractive new face, or at least an interesting face—just a guy I could hang out with to kill an hour or two.  Maybe he’d buy me a drink, or maybe I’d buy him one.  Maybe we’d share a laugh or two. Then I’d go home, either alone, or with company.

I scanned the crowd sitting around the bar.  I was one of the first ones to arrive, but now that it was getting later, the place was getting full. 

I glanced at my watch. Julius and Catherine were probably back in Vermont by now. I’m surprised they hadn’t called me yet to tell me they’d made it.

My parents had decided to buy a struggling dairy farm in Addison Vermont, from my mother’s second cousin.  They’d put all their life savings into it, against my personal and legal advice.  Dairy farmers were a dying breed, and I was afraid my folks were just prolonging the inevitable by buying Dorie’s heavily indebted farm.  But my parents, despite their age, were still idealistic hippies with stars in their eyes, and nothing could convince them otherwise when they thought they were doing the right thing.

So Julius gave up his tenure at the law school, and Catherine gave up her job as a midwife to return to Vermont, where they both lived in the sixties and seventies, where my sister Soleil was born, evidently in a barn or a manger of something.

I’d been born in the back of a van on the last day of Woodstock, Catherine, I’m told, was naked except for a thick coating of mud.  She was convinced it was her spirited dancing that forced me out two weeks early.

Soleil and I’d lived on what I liked to think of as a crazy hippie social experiment—an American kibbutz— for the first nine years of my life, outside North Bennington Vermont, until things kind of imploded, and the little group disbanded. 

Shortly after, with a new-found appreciation for capitalism, my father accepted a high-prestige, high-pay job teaching law in Chicago.  My parents bought a gorgeous home in Evanston, and there they remained until three days ago when the movers came and filled up a truck for the cross-country journey to a little farm near the border with New York, to a life my parents knew nothing about.

Our parents are rather unconventional people, and just barely could be called “normal” by most.  But my sister and I loved and respected them nonetheless, even though there were many times in our adolescence when we were embarrassed by them. 

Looking back though, I’d have to say we had a happy childhood.  Julius raised Soleil and me to feel equal to men; as a consequence, I never felt intimidated by them, and never kowtowed.  I never flattered them just to build up their ego, and I never allowed them to belittle me.  And unfortunately in some men’s eyes, that made me some kind of ball buster, battle-ax, or ice queen.    Their loss.

I’d always been pretty straight-forward.  I didn’t play head-games. If I wanted a man, I went for him.  I’ve asked plenty of men out on dates, paid their way, or split the bill with them if they preferred. 

Matter of fact, there was a man who’d been at the bar for a while, sitting off by himself and watching the Cubbies game.  He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him just yet.  He was here when I got here.  Occasionally, someone would come up and talk to him for a bit, but mostly he was alone.  I saw him glance at me a couple of times.  And I knew that look. It was a pretty universal look of a man who wanted a woman.

I studied him while he wasn’t looking He did have an interesting face, if not a conventionally handsome one.  Character is what his face had.  I bet he had some stories to tell.

I took a deep breath.  Blew it out.  Yeah, why not?

I flagged down the bartender and had him send the man across the bar a drink.  On me.  I watched as Sully prepared the cocktail. It was one of my favorites, the kind of hard drink that could reach right out of the glass and knock you on your ass without even trying—

the “Adios Motherfucker”— heavy on the rum, heavy on the vodka, heavy on the gin, heavy on….well, everything, really.

Sully delivered it to the man, and indicated me with a swing of his head in my direction.  Surprised and delighted, the man looked over at me and smiled. He had a gorgeous smile. His face lit up and his eyes sparkled.  He had good teeth. I smiled back.  He picked up the drink and crossed over to me.

“Don’t I know you from someplace?” he asked, watching me curiously.

“Someplace, yes,” I said. 

“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” he said, smiling into my eyes.

“Well, you have, but it was a long time ago, at Jack Huey’s.”  I stuck out my hand and his large but delicately-boned hand briefly engulfed mine. His palm was dry and warm, and his grip was very self-assured.

“Oh, right,” he said, clearly not remembering.  “Ray,” he said.  “Ray Vecchio.”

I clung to his warm hand.  “Stella.  Stella Kowalski.”