My family’s world of Derby barbecues and coming out parties may as well have been on the moon as far as they were concerned. The only connection they had to the world I’d come from was horses. This was the backside of Churchill Downs, land of small shotgun row houses. Ironically, in a world where people were able to shake hands from their bedroom windows, they kept to themselves and knew nothing about one another’s business. It was like cellmates who subliminally built a wall dividing their cell at an attempt at privacy. By comparison, my family’s world of thousand-acre estates knew what went on in the most intimate areas of one another’s lives.
I suppose every man needed a watering hole he could call his own. Mine was Murphy’s Bar. They all seem to be named after somebody. In this case, it was likely an Irish immigrant who had been drawn to horses and opened it in one of the abandoned shotgun houses. He’d never expected it to go beyond the neighborhood hangout, and it never did. I harbored a sort of admiration for people who had a level of contentment. They’d started a little business and were happier to keep it small. They weren’t entrepreneurial. They had nothing to prove. They simply wanted to work for themselves. The world was full of them and sometimes I wished I were one. Unfortunately, whether it was in my genes or my family’s expectation, I had been raised to never settle, but to vanquish the competition. As many successful men throughout history had pointed out at one time or another, you are what you believe. The LaVieres believed themselves above the rest. Like it or not, I was one of them.
Maybe that’s why Murphy’s held such an appeal. There I was anonymous. No one asked questions, and no one cared. Oh, they might rally behind a Cardinal’s basketball game, or certainly behind races during the season but never interfered with one another’s lives. It was simpler. You never felt less than, you never felt greater than. There was plenty of world out there to levy that sort of judgment without looking for it close to home.
Murphy’s fa?ade was that of a normal house, except it was painted bluegrass green. The only other giveaways were the neon signs in the shaded windows. One read “Open” and the other read “Beer & Wine.” That pretty much said it all. What they didn’t advertise, however, was their small kitchen in the back. It turned out the best corned beef and cabbage during the winter months, and equally delicious barbecued ribs during spring and summer. No one advertised it. It wasn’t listed in any culinary magazines, and no television crew pounced and splashed it over their Saturday morning talk show. Again, it was a place for privacy, and anyone who went through the doors picked up on that instantly. They liked it that way.
The current “Murphy” went by that name just because it was simpler. Once I’d heard a frowsy-haired woman I supposed to be his wife, shout out “Orville” from the kitchen. When he didn’t answer, she filled the doorway with her glowering, pocked presence. His face had inflamed, but he’d gone in to see what she wanted. No one blamed the sonofabitch for going by “Murphy,” so we let it lie.
He was at the bar now, pouring me a beer from the tap. Years of practice had taught him how much to pour; just enough to let the foam make you think your glass was full but not so much as to slosh over the rim when he skated it down the bar to you. Murphy’s operated on a purely cash basis. There were no tabs, and you paid as soon as you were served. It kept things clean and impersonal.
The old nineteen-inch tube television mounted on the wall was always tuned to sports. If you didn’t like sports, you just didn’t look up at it. The only time Murphy touched it was to crank up the volume when a race was being run down the street at Churchill. Otherwise, the volume was off. The old sets didn’t have closed-captioning, so a good deal of the entertainment centered on what the hell was going on. There was a sort of ongoing betting pool as the guys wagered on whether a certain commercial was for feminine hygiene or keeping your dick hard when you got old. Mrs. Murphy was the ref.
The bar smelled like a glass of beer floating a dead cigarette. The glasses were scratched and not always too clean, but nobody cared. After all, what was more sterile than alcohol? A few of the regulars would engage in arguments from time to time. It usually had to do with politics or sports. There was little else in their world to separate them from one another but their opinion on both.
A guy who identified himself as Kenny struck up a tentative conversation with me one evening. He was a fighter, a wannabe Muhammad Ali. Kenny was from one of those unpronounceable countries in Africa. He’d worked his way over to the States on a freighter and never left. He earned enough for existence by cleaning the gym where he trained, and I suspected Mrs. Murphy gave him food in return for other services rendered. He was an athletic specimen, to be sure.
Kenny asked me if I was local, to which I automatically replied, “No.”
I didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t ask me to. Maybe he was looking for another way to pick up some bucks. I’ll never know because he didn’t bring it up again. He seemed to be uneducated, but I knew he could read. I watched him slide over a paper someone finished. He went directly to the sports section, and I saw then where his dreams lay. I hoped for his sake that Kenny was one of those people who was happy with settling for less.
As for his part, I think Kenny sized me up before the first time we spoke. Breeding has a way of showing itself. You can’t put a sheet over a million-dollar Thoroughbred and expect it to look like a broken-down nag. He understood and said nothing. That’s why Kenny and I became friends. I’ve always found I sort of liked non-Americans better. There was an un-programmed innocence about them. They hadn’t been corrupted by the greed and the artifice. They understood core values and lived for the purpose of survival. That resonated with me.
On a couple of occasions, I stopped by to see Kenny at his gym. We sparred a bit, and I liked the exercise, but more so, the confrontation. It tapped in to something deep inside. I couldn’t afford the luxury of proving myself in a brawl. Some days I felt as sheltered as a little girl. Staying ahead of the law in a world where you had no roots did that to you.
In the gym, he taught me some moves and how to defend my face. He’d kick me hard in the shins to correct my footwork. I was a fast learner and even though he was physically more muscular, I learned to become a worthy opponent. In return, I pushed some bucks toward him from time to time. I called it tips for my trainer. We both recognized the brethren of being untraceable. I wondered how he would handle it if he ever did become worth a damn. He was an illegal. Maybe I could figure something out if that time came.
As it turned out, Kenny was the one who changed my life for the better. Just like his left hook, I never knew what hit me. Never saw it coming.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hawk