I looked out the window at the sunshine on a Chicago summer afternoon, its brightness mercifully tamed by the film of dirt on the glass.  It was the kind of day that brought people out—to the park, to the beaches, or for a backyard barbecue.  Saturdays like this, you could walk around, see plumes of smoke rising from the grills and smell the heady perfume of fried meat.  Summer in the city.
    
I sat as far away from the sunshine as I could, at the end of the bar.  Near the door, a young couple was seated, leaning forward.  They both wore leather jackets, although they were far too well groomed to be bikers.  Cops are trained to be good observers, but the job gets harder and harder.
        Time was, you could identify people’s affiliations by their clothing.  Hookers looked like hookers; society dames looked the part.  Now, everybody, from Britney Spears on down, dressed like they were waiting for their next trick.  And the guys—letting their skivvies show?  They call it underwear for a reason, for christsakes.
        I looked moodily into my glass.  I was starting to sound like an old fogey, at least in my own head.  Better not start voicing such sentiments or people would look at me queer.  That’s all I needed.  It was bad enough that they gave me the fish-eye the minute they found out I was a cop.  I didn’t need to be a “character” as well.  There were plenty of those walking around this town.
  
The couple was arguing, their low tones not disguising the intensity of the dispute.  It gave me a pang, for the days when I cared enough for someone to fight like that. But then there was much to be said for solitude, which I savored even more than the beer.  I didn’t even look at my own reflection in the age-spotted mirror above the bar, and I tried his best to ignore the bartender.
  
There were still places like this on the Southside.  It was more old-fashioned in its social views than its northerly neighbors.  There were some who contended that Chicago was really two cities, and the northern parts could be transported to either coast and fit in without anyone blinking an eye.  There they would find the same theaters, chi-chi restaurants and fancy stores, where our well-educated elites could communicate with their compatriots in Palo Alto or Greenwich.
  
On the Southside, people followed the old ways.  It was not what you knew, but who you knew. The local cop, the ward leader, the Councilman.  You gave a few bucks, put up a few signs, came to a rally.  They appreciated it and remembered.  Southsiders worked hard, drove their cars until they died, cheered the Sox and despised the Cubs.  For the most part, they watched in discontented silence as their neighborhoods got older, shabbier, and more dangerous.
  
On the north side, people worked hard to move to the suburbs and their “good” (i.e., “white”) schools.  On the Southside, people clung to their ethnic tribes, still went to church, and spent their free time with their families.  They didn’t have 1.2 children, they had three or four.  And they didn’t name them “Brad” or “Shelby,” but “John,” “Bill,” or “Mary,” or, more recently, “Juan” and “Maria.”
        It didn’t matter really, because every kid soon was labeled with a nickname.  Mine had been “Johnny the Rock,” for my solid appearance—short, barrel-chested, with big arms.  A wrestler.  In another era, a goon.  Instead, a cop.  Seventeen years on the force, the last five in plainclothes.
  
I drained my beer and put the mug down on the bar. The bartender looked over at me and I nodded. With long-practiced skill, the man grabbed an iced mug from the cooler, pulled down on the draft handle and filled it to exactly the right level to ensure no overspill.  Then he moved silently over, picked up the empty mug and set the new one down in exactly the same spot.
        We called him One-Eye Monroe.  He had two eyes, but while still in high school, he had developed the habit of hitching up one side of his face and letting a cigarette dangle out of the corner of his mouth.  Then we would tilt his head and squint with one eye.  He thought it made him look French, so he started wearing a beret and playing Charles Aznavour records.
  
Remember how your mother always told you that if you crossed your eyes they would freeze like that?  Well, after twenty years of this French boulevardier impression, One-Eye actually lost a lot of the visual acuity in his “squint eye,” and it became very sensitive to light. So then he started wearing a patch to protect it.  Of course, that made him look more like a pirate or a Hell’s Angel than a French guy, so he had to make up an elaborate story to explain the patch.  He’d change it periodically to keep life interesting, or maybe because he couldn’t remember his own lies.
        One Eye was small and slight then, but he could run fast and therefore survived high school.  Right after, he started working in his uncle’s bar.  He had the ability to pour exactly the right amount of booze to make a profit.  His high school experience had given him the gift for identifying the guys who were likely to make trouble. These two abilities made him an invaluable asset.  Uncle Georgio left One-Eye out front so that he and a bunch of his buddies could sit in the back, play cards and drink red wine that he made himself. The local cop knew One-Eye was underage, but Georgio slipped him a twenty once a week—and thus, a career was born.
  
After twenty years, the wine and cigars finally got to Georgio, and he left the bar to One-Eye. Some guys would have seen this as the opportunity to put their own mark on the place, but One-Eye didn’t touch a thing.  He stood in the middle of the dim and seedy room and declared that it was “full of atmosphere.”  He still let the old Italian guys congregate in the back room; but without Louis, their enthusiasm cooled, mostly because he was their perfect pigeon.  They went looking for suckers at the VFW.
        I once asked One-Eye if he thought about starting up a new game with some of us guys from the old neighborhood, maybe once a week or so.  He just grunted and said, “Whattaya nuts?  I used to lose to my uncle.”
        So that was that.  Some of the old crowd would come around periodically and have a drink or two, but this was no “Cheers.”  Nobody wanted to know anyone else’s name.  
        In point of fact, One-Eye never called me by my name, but simply addressed me like he did everyone else.  Now he asked, “Yo, did I ever tell you how I lost my eye?”
        I just looked at him, wondering when he would
  

Copyright ©2010 Calliope, All rights reserved.

Calliope
5975 W. Western Way
PMB 116Y
Tucson, AZ  85713

recall that we had known each other since the age of twelve and that I had lived through all of his facial transformations over the years.  But one thing friends do for each other is to listen to the same stories over and over, so I said, “No, tell me.”
  
At this, he launched into an elaborate narrative somehow involving a boat, a harpoon, and a whale. Ah, the Captain Ahab story.  He also had a pirate story, a boomerang story, and at least three variations on the “broken beer bottle in a bar” story.  I only half-listened, a skill I had acquired in elementary school when I learned early on to identify the few words that were likely to appear on a quiz. The rest could be safely ignored, usually for a lifetime.
        It was probably my only real talent, and kept me in good stead in a variety of situations.  As a cop, I could listen to endless denials or drug-induced ramblings, searching for those few incriminating words that would send my latest suspect into the arms of justice.
  
Women loved me, since they were able to go on at great length about all their favorite topics while I smiled beatifically, and with apparent interest.  Of course, sooner or later, I’d blow a quiz item, such as their birthday or favorite color, and they’d drop me like the proverbial hot rock.  My latest misadventure, a decent-looking blonde whose dog’s name (Miss Terry—mystery, get it?), I’d forgotten, was the cause of my being here today.
  
The couple by the door signaled that they wanted refills. Fat chance. They’d have to get up and come to the bar, since One-Eye did not exert himself to offer something as pedestrian as ‘service.’  After all, he considered himself French.
        Yet not the Maurice Chevalier kind of French.  One-Eye did everything he could to discourage women from coming to his place. That was probably why he had kept the murky wallpaper, scuffed floors and unpolished furniture.  He also didn’t serve food, saying it just encouraged “loiterers and lollygaggers.”  I was never sure what the latter term meant, and neither did he, but for One-Eye it could be applied to anyone he didn’t much like.
        To further spare himself contact with the fairer sex, One-Eye refused to serve what he called “sissy drinks.”  This included such abominations as banana daiquiris, piña coladas or anything, really, involving fruit juices or exotic liqueurs.  I remember bringing a girlfriend to the bar who blithely ordered an “Amaretto sour.”  One-Eye shot her a hostile look and served her a ginger ale. Behind her back, he just shook his head at me, indicating that I was wasting my time on any woman who would place such a demented drink order.  He was probably right, since she left me soon after for a dentist.
  
This winnowing of liquid offerings left One-Eye with what he called a “classic male repertoire.”  This he had perfected over the years with the kind of loving yet ruthless attention normally only found in nuns who teach schoolboys.  In other words, they tried to achieve perfection from only the roughest of raw ingredients.  So One-Eye prided himself on the perfect Martini—dry enough to make you gasp.  Or the perfect gin and tonic, with the merest hint of lemon twist rubbed across the rim.
        As for the rest, he was a purist—with a variety of draft (never “lite”) beers, the best Scotch served only over one ice cube, plain (never flavored) vodka straight from the freezer, and bourbon whisky served neat.  If you wanted anything else, One-Eye reasoned, you just weren’t serious enough about drinking to be in a bar.
  
But I digress.  I do that a lot, I find. I originally thought this was the sign of a creative mind, but now I know it’s just a lack of discipline.  I learned this from my high school English teacher, who told us that, “To write well, we must first of all think well.  We need to group our thoughts into Main Topic, followed by Sub-topics, and occasionally, sub-sub topics.”  It was like a rhythm, really, and I always pictured her clapping her pale white hands to: “Main Topic, sub-topic, sub-topic, Main Topic, sub-topic, sub-sub topic.”
        My problem was that I always seemed to find the sub-topic, or God forbid, the sub-sub topic more interesting.  No sooner had I descended to their depths, that I would wander off, sometimes forgetting the Main Topic altogether, like a dignified but boring relative whose company you actively avoid.  Sub-topics were seductive, leading you into interesting nooks and crannies of human experience.
  
It was this proclivity that undoubtedly accounted for my singular lack of professional and personal accomplishment, leaving me at the age of forty-six, unmarried and childless, and still a detective junior grade.  How humiliating that a forty-six year-old should be a “junior” anything.
  
But I digress.  See what I mean? One-Eye, in a half-hearted effort to be what the modern pundits would call “supportive,” favored me with one of his cogent commentaries.  These he always delivered with a world-weary sigh, although he had, to my knowledge, never left the state.  “Yo, your problem at the job is that you can’t keep your mind off the women, and your problem with the women is that they don’t understand your job.”
        “Women,” he would say, “don’t know from real work.”  Real work was confined to occupations that were physically dangerous—cops, firemen, construction workers and, of course, bartenders.
  
Actually, I thought women understood my work very well—the lousy pay, the erratic hours, the boring surveillance work, the paperwork and the soul-destroying chore of confronting every form of cruelty day in, day out.  No wonder they wanted no part of it.  Who would?  The only ones who survived were those who could put it out of their minds, who could move on to—another sub-topic.
        I signaled One-Eye for a shot of bourbon.  I picked up my glass and gave a toast: “To digression.”
        “Yo, sounds right to me,” One-Eye said, and gave a Gallic shrug.
    
    
                       About the Author
     
        New SIG member, Leilani Allen has lived in Chicagoland for the last 21 years. Several years ago she began work on a novel that has since expanded to a six-volume adventure/romance set in an alternate 17th century world. She has also just completed her first mystery novel, and has finally decided to try to get the stuff published. This story is her first fiction submission anywhere.