(Chapter 1) (Chapter 2)
CHAPTER 3 from the novel POOKOO
The Apartment
Chicago comes from the word shikaakwa meaning wild leek in the extinct Native American Miami-Illinois language. That translates to the word skunk. It was nicknamed The Windy City for its long-winded politics, not the mighty breeze which comes off Lake Michigan.
Chicago was designed at a North-South East-West grid pattern starting downtown at Madison Street and Michigan Avenue (zero-zero). The Elysium is at 6400 North Sheridan Road. Anna-Krista and I lived near 7000 North Sheridan in a 60-unit apartment building. Katlin and his wife Cassandra were separated; he lived a block north of us on the other side of Sheridan Road in a three-storied brick garden apartment catercorner to the Loyola Park field house. His Gerry-rigged basement studio was as big as a boxing ring. (It was almost as big as the marble bathroom he and Cassandra once had, which was once profiled in North Shore magazine.) I went through the alley and down a plain back doorway into a moldy hallway. Katlin’s numberless apartment door was open all the way. Next door, in the laundry room, a clothes dryer ran.
I knocked on his door. “Katlin?”
I flipped the light switch and the round fluorescent light in the center of the room flickered like a halo with karma gone bad.
His collection of steel and antique wooden javelins lay on the floor like giant pieces of a Pic-Up-Stix game. I stepped over the javelins and a UPS shipped cardboard tube. The top of an Ethan Allen dresser was full of trophies and another two dozen were in the room. An old baseball glove, with a cloth and a bottle of oil, was on a plant pedestal. The only thing on any wall was a velvet Elvis painting. The baseboards had stacks of matted frames of medals and magazine and newspaper clippings.
Katlin didn’t have a couch – he used the weight bench. A pile of open mail lay on a wobbly coffee table and on top was a rejection letter from Roosevelt University for a track coaching job. One piece of a gourmet vanilla cake was untouched and the other was half-eaten. Two Waterford champagne flutes were set out (only one had been used) and there were two empty bottles of Cook’s Extra Dry. His silver Olympic medal served as a drink coaster.
A combination TV and VCR set were on the floor and a video of his wedding was playing. He didn’t own a radio but he did have an old Super 8 movie projector and camera. I looked at the cake, then at the date on the TV screen. It was Katlin and Cassandra’s 8th anniversary – June 23rd.
Katlin and Cassandra were at the main table in the grand ballroom of the Hilton Towers. Silverware clinking against glass – Katlin and Cassandra kiss. I fast-forwarded.
Guests were interviewed, wishing the newlyweds well. More clinking glasses. The newlyweds kissing, the bride blushing.
I lit a cigarette and watched more of the videotape. Cassandra’s father, Thorne S. Kippling III, moves to a podium with a microphone. Mr. Kippling, the third-generation President and CEO of Kippling Industries, a Lake Forest-based fastener manufacturing company, removes a few notes from his suit coat, puts on his reading glasses and clears his throat. “I am proud to announce to our shareholders that our company had annual sales of $120 million this fiscal year.”
The crowd laughs.
“Oh, Daddy,” Cassandra scolded. Mrs. Kippling smiled.
Mr. Kippling’s speech ends by welcoming Katlin into the family and wishing the newlyweds all the best.
I fast-forwarded.
Katlin, in a black tuxedo, huddled with his groomsmen.
The crowd clinks glasses.
“Our lips will chap!” Katlin shouts.
The clinking continues.
Katlin takes a Tiffany clock from the gift table and tucking it under his arm like a football, Katlin zigzags between tables and chairs, chats with guests over by the bar, then zigzags to the far side of the room and hands the clock off to me. He dashes across the entire room until he hops on the top back of a leather-padded chair, lands it gently, takes Cassandra’s hand, dips her and they kiss. The crowd cheers. Katlin raises his hand in a fixed wave and smiles as Cassandra pulls him out onto the dance floor to the strains of Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You.” Cassandra gazes into his eyes and whispers “Forever.”
I fast-forwarded and let the tape play during a shot of me in a dark corner palming the backside of Anna-Krista (we married the following summer). In the video Anna noticed we were on camera, and her hand slapped mine away, the both of us laughing.
The video kept playing.
I ate a snack of Triscuits and sharp cheddar cheese and headed to the bathroom. Blood pooled on the white bath tile and in the sink. I gagged and spat the snack into the toilet.
“Katlin!”
No answer.
Pain pills were in the pedestal sink and on the floor. The shower curtain and rod were ripped down. The window over the tub was broken out – he had tried to jump out the basement window. The medicine chest’s mirror was splintered and smeared red with blood like it had been head-butted many times. There was a red punch hole in the white drywall. The TV showed Katlin and Cassandra leading “The Bunny Hop.” The clinking glasses started in again. I looked around the apartment. His reading lamp had been whipped across the room like in the hammer throw event. I ran outside.
Across the street at Loyola Park the fold-out table, drill people and TV crew gone. The afternoon rush hour traffic buzzed along on Sheridan. Two paramedics were loading Katlin, and one of his steel javelins, into the back of the ambulance. The paramedics had assessed his condition and realized Katlin’s blood was real, his wounds not mock-wounds. For a moment they thought Katlin’s wounds were from the javelin.
“St. Sebastian!” Katlin shouted. “St. Sebastian!”
He was 6-foot-2, 215 pounds and had a 33-inch waist and 7 percent body fat. His blue-gray eyes were otherworldly, like light from a movie projector. He had good teeth set off by a chiseled jaw and his face was slightly chipped from time and the elements, and his thick head of black hair was matted down by dried blood. He wore a bloodied white football jersey with the number 28 on it, Lycra shorts and Nike cross-training shoes.
I ran across the street. “Hey! Stop!” I said, waving my arms.
“St. Sebastian!” he cried. “St. Sebastian!”
“Hang on, buddy,” the driver called back to Katlin. The driver hit the siren and traffic stopped. The ambulance slowly ran the red light, moved out onto Sheridan Road and flew down the street.
A former resident of Rogers Park, Doug Shiloh has been a sports editor, a proofreader, an educator, and even a restaurant mascot. A graduate of Enfield, Connecticut’s Enrico Fermi High School, and Rock Valley College, Shiloh was a Manuscript Contributor at The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Shiloh’s fiction and poetry has appeared in Cherrybleeds.com, Fictionaut, WordPlaySound.com, The Electric Acorn, Zouch Magazine and Stockyard Magazine.com. In the mid-1990s, he produced celebrity and expert “Centerstage” events on America Online, which garnered notice in USA TODAY. He hosts The Literary Road Show, a traveling live event reading forum. He lives in Belvidere, Illinois with his wife Brenda. His official web site is www.dougshiloh.tumblr.com.
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dougshiloh