Neal Pollack

Story was he had been a Comiskey Park beer vendor. His nickname was from the Miller Genuine Drafts he once poured from his tray. Allegedly he’d been fired over an aggressive response to a drunken fan’s insult. Since the spring, he parked cars at a new jazz club around the corner on Ogden, spending the hours from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. in an aluminum and glass box the size of two old-fashioned phone booths welded together. His most prized of few possessions was a tiny, eight-inch black-and-white TV, but during the day it wasn'’t safe in the parking lot booth. By long-standing agreement, when he left his shift, Genuine would hide the television on Kimball’s second-story back porch. In the morning, Kimball would retrieve the TV and take it into his shop for safekeeping until 6 o’clock on the nose, right at closing, when Genuine would stop by and retrieve it for the night. Twice Kimball had made minor repairs, once to the antenna and once to the loose knob, without charging Genuine or even mentioning what he had done.

“Yeah, okay,” Kimball said. “I'’ll be right down.”

Kimball slipped back into the kitchen to get a quick bead on news coming over the scanner. Nothing going on, just a trespassing call from the University of Chicago library. Gerry leaned on the buzzer three times in annoying succession and Kimball grabbed his keys, spun out the door, and sprinted down the steps.

Genuine was hopping on the sidewalk, arms rigid at his sides, his long, curly black hair, Ace Frehley hair, you know, from KISS, Jen had called it, bouncing around his head. Kimball had seen him high before, although he was never certain what combination of herbs, inhalants, liquors, powders, or pills got Gerry off.

“Let’s make this quick, Gerry,” Kimball said. “I’m kind of busy.”

“Oh yeah, oh yeah,” Genuine said. “You have a lady up there? Jennifer?”

“No, man.” Kimball said. “Just

stuff. It’s late.”

“I know. I know. This is the case.”

Kimball pegged Gerry at about his own age, forty, and wherever he was from originally his accent didn'’t sound foreign, exactly. His English was occasionally quirky but always understandable, even in his present state, and his dialect sounded more like a nasally amalgam of Chicagoese and urban slang than it did Middle-Eastern or Russian. His body rigid, Gerry continued to hop like he was underdressed for the cold. But the night air couldn'’t have been much below seventy.

Kimball pushed aside the padlocked iron cage that stretched across the door to his shop and unlocked two deadbolts and then waved Genuine Gerry inside. Gerry rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “It’s right here,” Kimball said, walking quickly back to his workbench. He lifted the set by the handle and held it out, but Gerry was looking away, his eyes scanning the broken merchandise.

The indoor fluorescent lights were off, but plastic knobs and chrome trim twinkled in streetlight leaking between the iron bars on the window. Hundreds of small appliances lined every wall in the narrow shop. Some were awaiting repair. The ones that had been wiped clean and polished and dusted with compressed air sat near the front of the shop in anticipation of their owners. Many were shells, partially hollow, which Kimball had cannibalized for parts.

Gerry counted the shelves with his finger, one, two, three, four, five, six, all the way up to the ceiling. “You got any of those flat screens in here? Whatyacallem? Plasma TVs?”

“Not today,” Kimball said, still holding the television in his outstretched arm. “Sometimes, though. Most of them are under warranty. Repaired by the manufacturer. Occasionally I get one of, uh, dubious origin that needs to be fixed.”

“Dubious?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure, of course, but when a plasma comes in here I usually suspect it’s been stolen.”

“Uh-huh. And whaddya do?”

“I fix it. It’s none of my business where it came from.”

Gerry began walking the perimeter of the dark shop, examining each television, radio, toaster oven, and computer. He didn'’t look ready to leave. Kimball leaned impatiently on his left hip. Of course, if he didn'’t hate confrontation so much he would have told Gerry months ago to find a new place to stash his crappy little TV. The secret to a solitary existence is to never make waves. Entanglements are just like they sound, ways in which you and other people are hopelessly entwined. Kimball reached up on a shelf and turned one of several in a row of police scanners to low volume.

—Go ahead.

—We’re at the CITGO at [unintelligible]. We have an individual refusing to leave. It’s going to be a black male [unintelligible].

“Most of the stuff I get nowadays is old,” Kimball explained. “Stuff with sentimental value, or obsoletes the Compaqs and the Sonys and the RCAs no longer make. Big console sets. Lots of record players. Tape machines. That kind of thing.”

Gerry turned to face him. “I need money.”

“What?”

“Hundred-fifty dollars. I don’t give him, he cracks me up.”

“Who?”

“The man. The man in the green car.”