Untold Secrets–Part 4

Lo My head is spinning as I listen to what he is saying, even though I hear the words coming from his mouth I can’t force my brain to let them be real. My mind flashes back to all the times I had growing up with Uncle Mack. Family dinners, backyard barbecues and swimming in the pool he was my Uncle Mack, he couldn’t be this man he is telling me about, could he? Then just like you see in the movies, my brain hit zoom on all of the still images of memories in my head. I can see all the scars on his hands as he passes the butter at Sunday dinner, I see the long jagged scar on his shoulder and back while he is throwing me in the pool, I see how one of his eyes is droopy as he winks at me on Christmas. How could I have been so naïve? The revelation that he is who he says he is, is like getting the wind knocked out of me. I am gasping for air and trying to slow my mind down when I hear him ask “From here it gets real dark, so how much do you want to hear Lo?” I manage to compose myself enough to squeak out “All of it.” He simply nods, then pauses to fumble around behind more paint cans to find another bottle of whiskey. There is a chill in the air of the barn and it makes me shiver. He eventually pulls out the bottle he looking for and notices the chill as well it seems because he walks over to the wood stove and throws a couple more logs on the fire. He cracks open the new bottle and pours a finger of whiskey into each of our now empty coffee mugs, then begins again picking up where he left off. I listen to the story as it grows darker and darker. I am jotting down notes and occasionally asking questions. As the story takes on a life of its own I no longer feel a family connection to it and seem comfortable with hearing all of the grotesque details. Hours and a half a bottle of whiskey go by when he comes to the end of the story. Uncle Mack looks defeated and slightly drunk, I am exhausted and conflicted. There is just so much to process, here is a man who I have loved my whole life and yet he has been behind such atrocities that I don’t know how to look at him anymore. On one hand he is my loving uncle as he has always been but on the other he is almost pure evil. He looks at me and its almost as if he can read the thoughts in my head, he shrugs apologetically and gives me a half hearted smile. He stands and puts his hand on my shoulder and says “Look Lo, I understand if this changes things between us, but just know I am still Uncle Mack and I love you. You’ve been a hound dog tracking down people that gave you some of the story so you would’ve found out about me eventually anyway. I appreciate you coming and asking me directly... I mean that. So, now you got one hell of a story, kid. What are you going to do with it?” I glance down at my notebook, I had completely forgotten about it in the last few minutes and I think I have honestly no idea what I am going to with it. Uncle Mack is right, it is one hell of a story and would probably get me a book deal and possibly a best seller. I turn it over in my hands and can almost see myself being interviewed about my inspiration for this novel then as I am about to answer I see my Uncle’s tired weathered face staring at me from behind a glass partition. It’s too much for me to think about so I drop the notebook, hang my head and rub my neck. The barn is completely silent with the exception of the fire roaring away in the woodstove. I turn things over in my head a few more times before I realize what it is I must do. I kneel to pick the notebook back up from the ground, and as I am doing so Uncle Mack catches me glancing around the barn. As if he can read my thoughts again he asks, “You sure, Lo?” I simply nod, straighten myself up, walk to the woodstove and toss the whole notebook in. I watch in the first few seconds, its sits there slowly smoldering and smoking before exploding into a dazzling bright orange fireball. I turn around, smile a sad smile at my uncle and tell him “Some secrets are better left untold.” Some secrets are better left untold…

Untold Secrets–Part 3

Uncle Mack

I was born a fighter. I fought the devil the day I was born. He wrapped the umbilical cord around my neck and tried to strangle me on my way out, but as luck would have it he couldn’t finish the job. I lived but couldn’t breathe on my own for a bit, but I came out mostly ok. Sure my hands and joints are tight and I have a slight shake or twitch whatever you want to call it, but hell I am alive.

I grew up in a normal middle class working family, everyone had enough to eat and had clothes on their backs. Life was good, but the trials of boyhood and the journey to becoming a man is fraught with perils. My tremor as the doctors called it, made me an easy target for the neighborhood punks. They viewed me as weak and displayed their dominance in the social hierarchy by beating me to a pulp on a routine basis. One day when I was about twelve or thirteen I had had enough and when a large bully stepped in to smack me around I surprised him with a kick to the nuts. He went down and went down hard. Once he hit the ground I made sure he wouldn’t get up. I launched myself on top of him and pummeled him in front of everyone until his shocked friends yanked me off of him. He was bloodied and crying and I was too, but he appeared the worse for the wear. I would love to tell you it all got better after that because I fought one bully off, but it didn’t. He got pissed and swore revenge and we fought several more times, sometimes he would beat me badly and other times I got the best of him. But it was through these fights that I learned I had a knack for fighting. This particular bully eventually figured I wasn’t worth it anymore and moved on to fight easier targets, me however I started fighting anyone that said anything about me. If they looked at me funny I would go up and knock them out. I was determined to no longer be abused because people thought I was weak.

By the time I turned eighteen I had been in more fights than I could remember. It had gotten so bad or good depending on who you asked that I had started my own business more or less. Kids from high school would hire me out for fifty bucks to beat up whoever they wanted beat up. Yeah, I had made a real name for myself. Eventually this led to some unwanted attention, I was walking home one day from a local pool hall when I got jumped by three guys. They beat me to within an inch of my life because one of my high school clients had paid me to beat up of one of their younger brothers.

I woke up in a dark alley in a pool of my own piss and blood. The pain I felt was so intense I vomited twice before I could pull myself up to a standing position. I managed my way home and was out of commission for a couple of weeks. I told no one of what happened, they just knew I got beat up. While I laid in my room recovering I called in a few favors from guys I knew. I knew that a beating like the one I took doesn’t just happen in silence, I knew that whoever did it would be crowing about it like a banty rooster. Sure enough, it was just a matter of time before I had my three names.

It took me two weeks to feel well enough to exact my revenge. I found out who the biggest guy was that jumped me and his address. I waited until it was just about dark then I marched up his front steps and knocked on the door. Lucky for me he answered, as soon as the door was open I punched him through the screen. He stumbled backwards and the last thing I remember is the sound of my fists hitting wet flesh and a woman screaming. It turned out that the screaming was his mother and when the cops arrived she was beating me across the back with a broom handle as I lay exhausted on the puddle that was her son. The cops yanked me up and gave me a crack on the head for good measure then hauled me to the back of the police. As they threw me in and started driving for the station they were trying to question me but. all they got out of me was “I’m just going to take a little naps….” before I passed out from exhaustion.

I arrived at the police station, was booked and processed for assault and thrown into a holding pen until they found a cell for me. After a few hours of sitting there a large cop came to the holding cell with a clipboard held firmly in his hands. He started calling out names off the clipboard and a few of the other guys in the cell would stand up and walk through the door to line up. The cop got to the end of his list and starts yelling “Naps… Naps… Mack “NAPS” Schlage you get your low life ass up here in this line before I come in there and have you eating through a straw for the next month!” Apparently, the two cops that picked me up laughed all the way to the station about me passing out and had put down “NAPS” as one of my aliases on my processing paperwork. When you are in the joint, people don’t care what your name is. Your legal name is for judges and lawyers, you get called by your nickname, the name you made your bones with, and thanks to two jackass cops mine was Naps. That was it, the name just stuck and to every inmate in the place I was known only as Naps.

I ended up serving just over two months for that assault charge, I was released for “good behavior” and it helped that word got around that the kid I “assaulted” had jumped me first with his two buddies. After I got out, life went on as usual with a few fights here and there but now that I had a jail record, even as short as it was, I attracted the attention of people in need of my services. Word had got around about how I had my ass kicked but came up with a plan to get revenge.

I eventually drew the attention of a small time outfit that worked a lot in loan sharking, they approached me and offered me a job doing muscle work. I wasn’t working anywhere else and the money they flashed was tempting enough for me to jump at the chance, so I took the job. The first few “jobs” I would just show up with the loan shark and look threatening while he collected the debt. It was an easy job with a big paycheck for me, plus I liked being a tough guy, but like everything else my duties expanded. In just a few weeks, I was making collections and if they couldn’t pay I took my payment in the form of a pound of flesh. Most of the time, guys would pay up after a couple of black eyes, but occasionally you would run into a stubborn son of a bitch that thought he was tough and wasn’t going to pay. These were the guys I made my name with, I came up with a lot of creative ways to see the error in their ways. I broke a lot of bones, I would start with pinkies then make my way up the arm to wrists, forearms and elbows. If they were really stubborn I would take a baseball bat give them a clean shot to the knees making sure they would limp for the rest of their life and serve as a reminder to the other deadbeats to pay up.

I worked away at collections like this for almost two years before I got tapped to move up so to speak. I was given a territory and had to make house calls “selling security plans”. So I would go to the drug dealers and shop owners and basically extort a protection payment to operate and sell in my area. If they didn’t like my terms, I would persuade them to see things my way. If they were dealers, I would beat them to a pulp and take everything they had on them, I would take the drugs and the money and leave them in a pile. The shop owners were a little easier to deal with after you put some of their merchandise or their head through the front windows.

That was just the way of things for awhile, I would work over people and collect so much cash I was rolling in it. It would be the cash that drew me deeper and deeper in crime and violence. Word got around that I was very good at my “job” and was making quite a bit of cash, so a larger outfit rolled and bought me out so to speak. They approached me and told me I was working for them now and ordered me to pay a tribute percentage to the “organization”, but not to worry because they had big plans for me. I started to protest when they pulled out a few polaroids of my former employees with more holes than swiss cheese and the sight of that was enough for me to start down the road with my new employer.

From here it gets real dark, so how much do you want to hear Lo?

Untold Secrets–Part 2

Growing up Uncle Mack would come over to my grandparents’ house to visit and he was a great uncle. He would swim in the pool, toss us kids around and chase us through the back yard. When he was with the adults he would crack jokes but mostly held his opinion about topics that were more serious in nature. When he was around things were great, but then there would be long periods of time where Uncle Mack wasn’t around and didn’t stop by for visits. During these times my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles would talk in hushed tones if Uncle Mack was brought up. It was eavesdropping on these conversations that brought the revelation that maybe there was something more to Uncle Mack. Through these snippets of conversation I learned that he wasn’t as nice as I knew him to be and he did some bad things for bad people.

As I got older I grew more and more interested in Uncle Mack, I began to snoop around about his past. Eventually I found out he got into a lot of fights as a kid and got tossed in and out of juvie a few times before he was formally arrested for assault at the age of eighteen. After that one arrest there was no more evidence of him getting into trouble with the law again. I knew that there had to be more to it than that because he was far older than eighteen when I was growing up and my family still talked about him being a bad guy. I became obsessed with finding out more and more, so I petitioned the local jail for their records under the freedom of information act and was surprised at how easy they just handed me copies of them. Through that initial digging I found the start of the trail that led me to this point. I found out in the records that my uncle had been cellmates with Thomas “T.T” Taglia, a low level thug for a known crime outfit.

I spent weeks on the internet searching for this “T.T.” and eventually found out that he had spent years of hard time in jail then was eventually paroled and was working as a mechanic about an hour drive from where I lived. I tracked him down and he flat out refused to talk to me, but I was persistent and eventually he agreed to tell me a few things. I asked him about Mack Schlage and he had never heard of him. I was deflated but as a last ditch effort, I took out of picture of Uncle Mack when he was younger and showed it to him. Taglia looked at the picture and smiled a gap toothed smile, and said “Sure, I know this guy. But I ain’t never heard of him being called Mack. The man in this picture is Naps.” I was shocked as I stuttered “Naps? Naps who?” and Taglia just chuckled and said “I don’t know. They always just called him Naps, even in the joint it was ‘Naps! Back in line’, ‘Naps, you got a visitor’. It was always Naps.” After that Taglia spoke more freely and told me he had only known my uncle a short time but from what he knew he was some sort of fighter that got called on by local “wiseguys” for “muscle work”. He gave me the names of some other people that my uncle had supposedly worked for and I thanked him and left.

I spent the next year tracking down these people. Some of them would talk to me and some wouldn’t. Some of them had long been dead from “occupational hazards” and most of the rest were permanently incarcerated. From the ones that would speak to me I heard tales of my uncle being a good guy, always with a joke or a kind word for a kid, but I also heard truly terrifying stories about him beating people for debts to torturing people or worse. I was horrified that the man I knew and loved could be the same monster that worked with these criminals. It was just too unbelievable, it was like watching a movie like Scarface or The Godfather. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, it was like reading a great story with double lives, twists and turns, deception and vindication. I just couldn’t believe it would be true it had to be a case of mistaken identity.

I had filled a notebook full of notes from my interviews with criminal element that said they knew my uncle. I sat on that notebook for a full month debating whether or not I wanted to ask my uncle about what they had said and whether or not I really wanted to know the truth or just leave the past in the past. One night as I laid on my bed reading and re-reading my notes they started to sound more and more like a dialogue out of a bad Mafioso movie. I must have been sleep deprived because the more I read the more I started to laugh at the ridiculousness of what I had written down. I figured that these guys had all just put me on to screw with me, they couldn’t have know Uncle Mack. That’s when I had an epiphany. I wanted to be a writer and well, I had a pretty outline for a crime drama right in front of me, even if it was all bullshit. I decided that I would ask Uncle Mack about these things and when he laughed and told me I was crazy, I would laugh with him and tell him about all I had done and how I was going to write a book based on these phony baloney “interviews”.

The next day I called Uncle Mack and asked if I could meet him for breakfast and ask him a few things about when he was young. He agreed to meet me at his favorite diner the following morning.

That’s how I ended up sitting across from him drinking coffee in this crowded diner. The waitress takes our orders and we have some quiet small talk about my mother and father until the food arrives. He orders the short stack of pancakes which when they come do look like the “world’s largest pancakes’ as they are bigger than the plate and hanging off the edges. I order eggs and bacon and lustfully dive into them as soon as they are set down in front of me. In between bites of eggs, I mumble “So Uncle Mack, I ran into someone you knew when you were younger.” He finishes the last bite of his pancakes, pushes the plate to the edge of the table smiling and says “Oh yeah, Lo? Who is that?” I lower my voice to a little over a whisper and say “Thomas Taglia”. I watch a flash of recognition cross his eyes before he looks at me stonefaced and replies “Never heard of him. He must be confused, I don’t know anyone by that name.” I lean forward to whisper again “That’s funny because he said the same thing about you… Naps.”

The look my uncle stares at me with is enough to freeze me in my seat. Without taking his eyes off me he signals the waitress for the check. When she arrives with it the look on my face is enough for her to take the cash for the bill and not return. Uncle Mack looks at me as he stands up and says only “Follow me”. I stand up even though my legs feel like jello and my bacon and eggs are threatening to return. I follow him outside to the side of my car, he opens the door and tells me to meet him at his house. I watch as he climbs into his old ford farm truck, turns the key and leaves the parking lot in a cloud of dust. The whole ride to his house I am trying to control my breathing and the panic I feel rising in my throat.

We make it to his house, he gets out of the truck and motions for me to follow him to the barn. I park next to his truck and by the time I get out of my car he has already disappeared into the dark barn. A moment of panic seizes me, I imagine him doing the horrible things I had heard about to me because I know his secret. I feel like I have to move, I have to run, I just have to get the hell out of there but my legs won’t move. I am utterly frozen in the driveway until the panic finally forces the remains of my breakfast up and out into the driveway. I am bent over retching when I feel his large hand on my back as he shoves a cup of coffee under my nose. I stand up, wipe my mouth on my sleeve and gratefully take the coffee. He winks at me, turns back towards the barn and says over his shoulder “That diner always does make their eggs a little greasy, don’t they?” I take a moment to recollect myself and then follow into the barn to find him sitting at his workbench drinking coffee. He motions to the stool next to him. I sit down and endure what feels like an eternity of uncomfortable silence before he looks at asks “Well, what do you want to know?”

His nonchalant, matter of fact way of asking helped to put me at ease. He was still my uncle and I knew that he loved me but there was a matter of unpleasantness that he would rather not talk about was all conveyed in that simple sentence. I blurted out “Is it true? Is it true what all these people have said about you?”

“I don’t know what they said or who “they” are, but yes I have done many, many terrible things in this life. So let’s start with what you “know”.” He replied.

I went to pull out my notes and realized I had left them in the car. I apologized and ran to get them. He had just poured a second cup of coffee and was topping it off with a small bottle of whisky he had hidden behind a few paint cans when I returned. I sat back down on my stool and fished out my notebook and handed it to him. He flipped through the pages and read some of the notes, but mostly he scanned the names of the people I talked to. Sometimes he would smile as he read a name and at others he would simply scowl and take a long pull off his coffee. Once he reached the end of the notebook, he flipped it shut and handed it back to me. We sat in silence, sipping our coffee until he finally said “Most of those things are true, some are not and most of that is taken out of context even though that’s a poor excuse for those things.”

I was completely dumbfounded, I opened my mouth to protest but nothing would come out. His eyes looked heavy and sad as he stared at me waiting for me to say something, finally he broke the silence with a question, “Well, you’ve gone a long way to find out about Uncle Mack’s secrets, if you still want to know I guess I will tell you. But if I tell you there will be things that won’t be easy for me to say and they won’t be easy for you to hear. It’s up to you, what do you say?”

I mulled it over in my head, I had come so far to learn the truth about him. I really did want to hear his side of what happened for better or worse he was my family and I wanted to know. I nodded to him and pulled out my notebook and flipped to a page I had with questions for him but I couldn’t force myself to ask him one question. He sensed my inner turmoil and said “Well, I guess I will start at the beginning, but by the end I am hoping you won’t need what’s in that notebook and we can keep this between us. But it is ultimately up to you what you want to do, I’ve made my peace with God and I know an eternal punishment is waiting for me.”

I waited for him to refill his coffee and empty the last of his stash of whisky into it, then he began.

Untold Secrets–Part 1

The other day L Bird sent me an email about a short story contest. She thinks I am a good writer and should submit something, me on the other hand am not so sure I am that good of a writer. I tend to switch tenses a lot, and forget dialogue I forgot all the rules when it comes to writing that junk, but curiosity got the best of me so I googled what the technical definition of a short story is.

It turns out that the definition isn’t so simple, but I honed in on it’s normally a narrative that is anywhere from 1000 – 9000 words. After that you start getting into novellas, novels, and such. Well, I figured I might as well give it a shot what’s the worst that could happen, right? They could only tell me that I should never put down a written word again, yeah right! Like I would listen anyway.

So I wrote a short story and I figured I would throw it up here in segments and see what people thought good or bad. It is roughly 5700 words long (approx 8 typed pages) and written as a narrative. I used my nickname for the “bad guy”, well because, well I don’t know why but anyway I kind of feel like a douche for doing it but it’s too late to go through and change it now. So I guess enough stalling, here we go…

Untold Secrets

The clock on my dash says 6:47 AM. It stares at me mockingly, knowing that I am already late as the morning show hosts on the radio banter back and forth about last night’s newest reality television series. I turn that nonsense off and push the gas pedal down even further hoping to reach my destination by 7 AM without attracting the attention of the local sheriff. I am headed to a greasy spoon diner in rural upstate New York to interview someone for a novel I am really hoping to write. I was supposed to be there to meet him at 6:30, but as usual it seems I can’t get out of my own way and am late again.

As the miles click by down the highway I try to go over what I want to ask and how to approach my subject. There will be delicate areas I am sure and but I really want to get his true perspective so I can relay that in my novel. My mind wanders through the dark recesses of my brain to when I realized I first wanted to be a writer. It was my sophmore year in college and I was fast approaching a precipice of flunking out. I had screwed off all through my college career just doing to bare minimum to squeak through to the following semester but it was catching up to me and there was a very good chance that if something drastic didn’t happen I would flunk. Then as luck would have it, life provided me a catalyst. It was a shitty catalyst but a catalyst none the less. The girl I had been dating since high school sat me down and broke my heart. She told me the truth about myself, that I was an overweight, sloppy, lazy bum who wanted nothing less than to coast through life doing the least amount of work possible while expecting that everyone else work hard around him to satisfy his own selfish needs and that she wasn’t going to be a part of that or my life anymore.

After the initial range of emotions of rage, anger, hurt, and eventual sadness I realized she was right even if I didn’t know what to do to change it. I sulked for about a week, missing classes, not leaving my room except to pick up delivery pizza from the entrance of the dorm until my mother called. She told me that she had received a letter from the school saying that I was on the verge of failing out of school. After fifteen minutes of pep talking me she changed her tactic and told me to get my head out of my ass and finish school or I would be in the most serious of situations and then promptly hung up. I wasn’t sure what “the most serious of situations” was but it was enough to get me up and to my next class which happened to be a literature/writing course.

I walked into the class, neither the professor or my classmates seemed to notice or care about my presence or lack thereof in the recent weeks. I sat through the lecture and received the homework assignment of writing a short story about anything but in the style of Victorian authors like Charles Dickens or Emily Bronte. With my heart still dashed and broken I threw myself into this assignment and wrote about love, heartache and redemption. I finished the assignment on time and for the first time in a long time felt I would receive a grade of at least a C. A week later my professor pulled me aside before class and handed me my story which was emblazoned with a bright red B+ across the top. He complimented me on my story and told me I showed a real affinity for writing and offered to work with me on cleaning up some of my faults. That was the spark that started it all for me, from that point on I changed my attitude and started taking all of my classes and writing seriously. I managed to pull up my grade point average and graduate with a solid 3.5 GPA.

I was pulled from my nostalgic reverie by the hand painted sign for the diner emblazoned with “World’s Largest Pancakes Served Here”. I looked at the clock again, 7:07 AM, not good. I hoped he was still there, he wasn’t exactly a man that liked to be kept waiting. I jumped out of the car, grabbed my messenger bag with all of my stuff and ran towards the door. I was almost to the door when I caught my toe on the stoop and went sprawling on the ground. As I got myself up and dusted off I looked up to see every patron staring at me through the plate glass, not exactly the first impression I had wanted to make.

Nevertheless I picked up my bag and walked into the diner feeling embarrassed and wishing I was so small that no one would see me. I scanned the diner until I saw him sitting at a booth in the back corner. He was seated with his back to the wall carefully observing both entrances, he saw me and gave me the slightest of nods to acknowledge he had seen me. I walked over to his table and he gave me another nod to infer that I should sit, then in a gravelly voice he said “How have you been, Lo?” I sat down and replied “I’m good, Uncle. My Mom says to tell you hello.”

The man seated across from me was my uncle, my mother’s older brother. To look at him in his faded wrangler jeans, plain grey v-neck t-shirt and dusty ball cap he looked like the rest of the old farmers that frequented this diner. He was in his sixties and would have had some sparse grey hair if he didn’t keep it trimmed so short. His face was weathered and checked by deep creases and wrinkles but his clear blue eyes still sparkled. His lips twitched as he concentrated on keeping his massive hands steady enough to hold a hot cup of black coffee to his goatee framed mouth. Everything about him was the look of a common working farmhand and that’s the way he liked it. To me and everyone else in the diner he was Mack Schlage but to the eastern seaboard crime outfits he was simply known as Naps.

To Be Continued …