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NOTES

A Steady Rain is a duologue. Although the script runs only 45 pages, the running time of the play is full-length (90 to 105 minutes). Joey and Denny speak directly to the audience and tell their story, which, from time to time, is not exactly the same story. At times they are testifying before an Internal Affairs review board. At times they are vying with one another for credibility. Both characters have southside Chicago accents. They also habitually drop words and occasionally make words up and speak in redundancies (sometimes a typo is not a typo). Please, trust the script as written. Joey and Denny also occasionally address one another, in which instance a formal scene occurs. No parenthetical shifts in address are indicated in the text. It should be obvious from the context whether Joey and Denny are addressing the audience or one another. The light changes noted throughout also indicate movement changes.

DENNY: We just signed on as a Nielsen family, yunno, the ratings guys? They come into your home and attach this, the fuck, this box to your TV. And when you watch, all you do you pass around this remote and whoever’s watching what, they punch in they’re watching, right? They hooked a box up to the TV in Noel’s room. There’s even one buttoned up to the black and white kitchen set and the 19-inch boober me and Connie got in the boudoir. So the first night we got it, Connie and the kids and me, we’re lounging around in the family room figuring out how we can push all these buttons at once. Yunno, really screw up the Nielsen guys? And my partner, Joey, he’s over, I explain to him what’s the deal. And he tells me…

JOEY: You go pushing more than one button at a time, Den, you’re not screwing anybody. You’re just canceling yourself out.

DENNY: The fuck do you know, you fuckin’ Mick? Are you screwing anybody presently?

JOEY: Same thing you vote Democrat and Republican the same election. And besides…

JOEY: Them Nielsen guys pay more attention to toilets flushing during commercials than to any frigging box.

DENNY: And I tell Joey he’s fulla shit. Which he is usually. ’Cause, I mean, is he a Nielsen family? The elbow-bender still lives in this one room chinch pad looking over an alley. Never married, not even dating, for Chrissake, so his chances of even having a family let alone being lucky enough to get the call from Mr. Nielsen and enlisted into the privileged ranks are pretty slim, yunno what I mean? So, of course, he puts down the value of being a Nielsen family ’Cause people, friend or foe, they do this all the time consistently. They put down what you got ’Cause they don’t got it ’Cause they wish they had it but they don’t. Even shits like Joey. I known the guy since kinnygarten. He puts down marriage, kids, big-screen TVs, everything that has value that he don’t got ’Cause if it has value that makes him a very poor man by comparison.

JOEY: So Denny’s on his way to the fridge for another Bud Lite, laying into me for dumping on his conspicuously acquisitive lifestyle again, when all a sudden the front pane window explodes in like this huge spider web of splinters.

DENNY: …the 52-incher, the one we just knobbed on hock from Best Buy to make a good impression on the Nielsen people…

DENNY: Nobody knows what the hell is up, glass falling all over my wife and kids, Joey diving over them to cover them best he can.

JOEY: Heinz was barking at the TV set ’cause it’s still, you know, sputtering fireworks and smoke.

DENNY: I had to yank out the plug and collar Heinzy and by this time Connie is screaming ’cause there’s all this blood.

JOEY: Things were already pretty choked that night before the bullet hit. Denny’d made up his mind to reform me. We’d both been passed over the third time in a row on detective promotions., I’d been half-fractured most the time since and Denny refused to let me put my life on the rocks about cowplop of that particular ilk.

JOEY: I don’t know. I do know I aced that detective exam the third time in a row…

JOEY: …and fifty guys with lower scores got upped to plainclothes ahead of me.

DENNY: Fifty guys upped to the ranks of dickhood with not only lower scores and less service but who just all happen to be a lot more ethnic than me and my bog-hopping amigo paisan over here.

JOEY: …he’s had it out for me and Denny ever since we went through the Department grievance procedure and forced him to remove reprimands he’d tucked in both our files. The reprimands were for racist remarks and sure, Denny and me, knocking around in the locker room might have let slip a rude word or two about the apparent injustice of this unstated quota system.

DENNY: But Dickerson’s cheese-eatin’ rat patrol overhearing something not even intended for their fuckin’ ears gives the man no right to put reprimands in our files that can effectively stonewall our careers.

JOEY: …and Denny, to keep me off the sauce, he talked Connie into having me over just about every night of the week.

JOEY: I appreciated the gesture. It was a good thing to do. Denny was always doing things like that, always looking out for people. He was a good guy. A people person.

DENNY: You show a nonstarter like this the good life, beautiful house, beautiful wife, beautiful kids, a dog, all these TVs, it can have kind of a reformative effect, right?

JOEY: Did me anyway. Only Denny, he’d bring these women to dinner night after night trying to fix me up. He brought this one woman Rhonda over. A hooker. I know this for a fact because I’d seen Denny taking money from her out on patrol. Nothing inherently bad in that. A dozen or so hookers, he looked after them and they greased him. In exchange, he wouldn’t run them in, keep the pimps off their backs.

DENNY: Hey, I enabled those girls to keep just about most what they made, exactly the way free enterprise in this country should be.

JOEY: Like I said, Denny was a stand-up guy. But this Rhonda…what a trip. Denny, he thought the kind of girl I’d fall hard for was Rhonda’s type. When actually it’s more the type he’d go for. Which was one of his faults, I guess. It was apparent from the first moment we all sat down at dinner what was up. Connie was bringing in food, tossing Denny the fisheye. And Denny’s getting all pissed off at me because I don’t talk to Rhonda. And Rhonda, I don’t know, she’s sensitive, I guess. Three glasses of wine, she’s stuffing her face, she never ate food like it, complimenting Connie, spitting chunks of half-chewed lasagna across the table onto Stewy’s high chair tray. Then she starts in about her childhood, which, believe me, was no Disney movie. When Rhonda brought up incest at the dinner table, that was it with Connie. She left the room. Denny’s shouting after her to get back to the table, to be civil, we got company. But Connie was a good match for Denny because she wouldn’t take any of his shit. I always thought that about them. They were a good couple. So Connie gone, who does Denny lay into next?

DENNY: I told Joey, I told him: it’s perfectly logical. To start a new life, person’s gotta make new friends, right? Rhonda don’t get exposed much to the good life. I wanna expose her to the good things, give her a taste of how good the good things can be. It’s you all over again, Joey. You got no right to look down. Everybody at this table knows you got a fairly severe drinking problem.

DENNY: Okay, well, hey, so maybe Rhonda didn’t know till now. But she’s company. And besides, I bring you to our table night after night for the same logical purpose. You get exposed to the good life suddenly, the bottle in your case, making a living flat on your back in Rhonda’s, it don’t look so fuckin’ appealing, right? Am I right? What? What I say?

JOEY: Fortunately, the phone rang. So Denny, before he answers it, he tells us:

DENNY: Sure, the fuckin’ phone rings, drop everything just to yap with some fuckin’ scammer who wants to sell me TV Guide. You two entertain yourselves, okay?

JOEY: And he leaves me and Rhonda there alone at the dining room table. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Neither could Rhonda, I guess. But while we were sitting there, out the corner of my eye, she’s sitting next to me, I could see her bottom lip start to quiver like she’s going to cry. But before she did, she runs out the front door with her coat. Denny comes back into the dining room jumping for joy because he got called to be a Nielsen family but then the smile drops from his face and he asks me:

DENNY: No, she did not drive. The general idea, shit-for-brains, is you give her a lift home. One thing, another, badda-bing-badda-boom.

DENNY: Did you say she was? All night, you’re Buster Fuckin’ Keaton with the silent bit. Dipshit didn’t say two words to her all night. I told him, it don’t just happen, Joey. You gotta make a fuckin’ effort. Great woman like Connie don’t just fall into your lap. And you know what the low-life tells me?

DENNY: As if I don’t know the fuckin’ difference. What, he thinks I plucked Connie outta the Virgin Spring when I married her? She had a history same as Joey, same as me, same as Rhonda. I told him that.

DENNY: Whatta you, a lawyer? Correcting me, what I say, what I think, you know what this is?

DENNY: What with fuckin’ AIDS now? That girl lays her life on the line just to make it day-to-day out on the streets and you dish her off beyond redemption?

JOEY: This bit about them and us? Sgt. Wallace down by the precinct, he suggested maybe to get on Dickerson’s good side before the next detective promos are made, me and Denny, we maybe take this race-relations seminar the Department is offering free, no charge. So I sign up but Denny, he’s too busy being a family man and all and he asked me to coach him on what they teach me, you know, keep on his back so he doesn’t let anything remotely mean-spirited slip in the locker room like before. So I do, I did. And we’re busting these two gangbangers, these Latino and African-American gentlemen. We caught them pants down with all this pharmaceutical grade H and coke—morphine, too, a fishing tackle box fulla vials. We load the haul into the patrolcar trunk, the cuffed gentlemen into the back seat, and up front, driving them in for booking, I tell Denny, the names he called these guys while we were reciting them their Mirandas, he should be a little more cautious. That’s all I said. And he gets all defensive.

DENNY: What, I said it to you, Joe. Polite company, you’re my goombah, my partner in crime. Whatta you gonna tell on me?

DENNY: Think ‘em? What, you want inside my fuckin’ brain, now, you Irish tampon?

DENNY: My ma, my dad, they barely had 15 words of fuckin’ English between ’em, these included.

DENNY: And I’m not offended you tell me something’s wrong the way I think.

DENNY: Nobody, okay? But I’m maybe as sensitive as this gangbanging ethno-shit in the back seat, maybe I take it that way.

DENNY: Personally, I don’t cogitate transcendental shit like that so well, so I punched the fuck.

DENNY: And I told him, keep your koo-koo-ka-chew shit, Joey. You know what PC fly ball said to me?

DENNY: Oh, he’s so sensitive. So I wrapped him in a headlock and give him a knuckle sandwich like this and said, so, so, so sensitive. So sensitive you could use him to wipe a wittle baby’s bottom. He pulls away all pissed.

DENNY: Effing? Excuse me, effing? Would that be with one Fs or two, Officer Friendly?

DENNY: Please at least pay me the respect of swearin’ like a man in front of me or not at all.

JOEY: It’s not about being a baby. It’s about you treating people better.

DENNY: Oh, you take a seminar in Racial Speak and suddenly you’re Mr. Fuckin’ Rogers?

DENNY: You might think it, but that seminar ain’t gonna make one fly shit fleck of difference your detective app. comes up again ’cause you’re the wrong fuckin’ color, spud.

DENNY: Do I file a lawsuit? Issue a fuckin’ reprimand? You and me, we take it on the chops, ’cause it’s funny, we got a sense-a humor about it, it’s the way thing are. So, please, I don’t wanna subject it to any more of your narrow-minded, neo-Nazi bullshit this afternoon ’cause I’m trying to do my job and drive a fuckin’ patrolcar over here, all right?!

JOEY: When Denny’s off on a tear like that, I just can’t talk to the guy.

DENNY: So, hey, Poindexter, you still coming over to dinner tonight or is your spoon arm too wounded? (Pause.) Connie’s making lasagna. (Pause.) Douche bag. (Pause.) C’mon, Joey, hey.

DENNY: Things, what things? Rearrange the affordable portables around that one-room roach motel you call home?

DENNY: My kids love you, Connie loves you, I love you, Heinzy loves you. Your right leg, any way. We want you there.

DENNY: Joey, we grew up together. We’re partners. You’re family. I care about you. I don’t want you going back to that armpit of a bachelor pad and sticking it to a bottle of Schnapps tonight.

DENNY: My ears, please, I’m sensitive. Hey, you got a problem with the bottle, I got a problem with my mouth. We’re helping each other out, right? Right? We’re gonna be detectives together someday, Starsky and Hutch, this is good for us, right? I look out for you, you look out for me. Back to back, Joey. Come on.

JOEY: After Denny stormed out to drive her home, I went upstairs to give Connie his message. She was in Stewy’s nursery looking out the window. She looked so beautiful holding him, you know, the way moms do. Room was dark. Moonlight on her face. Stewy conked out on her shoulder. I tip-toed over, brushed Stewy with the back of my finger on the cheek and saw out the window what Connie saw. Denny was out in the driveway with Rhonda. She was crying full out by then. Denny was, you know, consoling her. Connie didn’t like that one bit. It started to rain that night, I remember. I don’t think it let up more than a minute or two till this whole mess was over.

DENNY: This thing with Rhonda, Jesus, driving her home after dinner, she’s snottin’ up the dashboard of my Plymouth the whole way ’cause she’s embarrassed in fronta Connie and Joey, the kids and me ’cause she spit food across the table and something about her breasts, some mammary malfunction, both spigots leaking through her blouse or some shit. I told her I’m married, Ronnie, I got kids, I seen leaky tits before, it’s nothing to get in Dutch about. Hey, if there’s one thing Rhonda should not be ashamed about, it’s her upper frontal superstructure. Make that two things. Man. She slapped me with a wet one on the cheek to thank me for cheering her up and waggled her heart-shaped pillow of a derriere into this shitheap tenement where she lived.

When I went in after her, I kept thinking the place should be fuckin’ condemned. I followed Rhonda up to her door and when I knocked, it swung open. Shit side of Uptown and not even a working lock on the door. Rhonda had slipped outta her blouse and was bending over a dresser drawer. Out of it she lifted up this tiny baby and started breastfeeding it. She had this tiny baby and she’d left it all this time closed up in a sock drawer so she could come over to my place and socialize. She mighta seen me coming ’cause when she turned toward me, no top on, the baby glommed on to gazunga number two, she didn’t look too surprised. Christ, it was a beautiful sight. Like some fuckin’ stain-glass Madonna. Rhonda told me close the door. I did. I just watched her with the baby. After a minute or two, she took me by the hand and led me to her bed. Outta our clothes in a second, she pulled me into her from behind and she kept breastfeeding her kid. Sounds fuckin’ perverted, but believe me, it was the closest thing I had to a religious experience since my first communion.

I handed her some cash as I was leaving but she took it the wrong way. I told her I didn’t mean it that way. She’s putting the kid back to sleep in the drawer and I told her the money was for her and the kid, I’d get her more, anything to keep her off the streets, ’cause I had no idea she had a kid to take care of, it broke my heart. It fuckin’ did, I mean it. Rhonda wouldn’t look me in the eye when I tossed the money by the dresser, but I meant what I said. I’m fulla shit in many respects, but one-on-one I always keep my word.

So I’m back out in the Plymouth and a piece of a brick the size of my fist shatters my windshield. I seen this kid no more than 10 or 11 running, so I pull my service revolver and run after little fuck in the pouring rain. He ducks down an alley and me, my mind fulla Rhonda and Connie, my windshield, my kids, it don’t even hit me this yard rat’s leading me somewheres till a broomstick swings out at me from behind a dumpster and thwacks me square across the chest. Dead in my tracks, winded, I fall back, my service revolver goes flying and this slimy pimp piece of shit named Walter Lorenz jumps out from behind the dumpster, the man behind the broomstick. He calls to the kid, “The gun, Willy! Grab the gun!” and comes at me twirling the stick like a baton, one end of it sharpened and charred like a giant number 2 pencil. Walter tells me: “Not much of an escort without your piece, are you, Officer Lombardo?” I had dealings with this fuck a hundred times before. Last time, Rhonda’s jaw cracked, her eye swollen shut, I recognized Walter’s handiwork and had it out with him, told him I’d shoot him on sight next time I saw him. I shoulda seen this coming, which is always nice to say in hindsight, right?

Walter tells Willy keep the gun trained on me while he comes jabbing at me with his black-tipped broomstick, telling me it’s been a long time since he had shish-kabobbed cop in this parta town. He tells me I mess with Rhonda, I’m messing with more than his property. I’m messing with his income, which, in these parts, is a small matter of life and death to some people. Walter jabs at me again with the broomstick. Barely able to breathe, I roll away, clutching my chest. Bruised three ribs, I found out later, one of ’em cracked. Then, just as I was stumbling to my feet, reaching for Willy with the gun, Walter jabs at me again and sticks me deep in the thigh. My whole head went white and I musta let out some kinna scream ’cause when I could hear again, Walter’s jumping up and down in the alley laughing his ass off how he got me squealing like a stuck pig. Walter came at me again, this time at my chest, but I backhanded the point-a the stick away, yanked it crosswise toward me and Walter along with it so hard I clocked him one square in the jaw with the top of my head. He got the worst of it. I got a pretty hard head. Off balance, I tossed him to one side and slapped him across the face a time or two with the stick. Three or four times, maybe, I don’t remember. I swung around on my good leg and was actually about to drive the pointed end of that stick through his fuckin’ eyeball when he shouts to Willy: “Shoot the motherfucker, Willy! Shoot!”

I didn’t stick him but I shoulda. Hindsight, again. Instead I snapped the broomstick in half and chucked the pieces over a fence. Then I limped over to Willy, my hand out, asking for my service revolver. He’s got it locked on me, both hands shaking, all the time Walter, his coach, his mentor, prodding him on with: “Shoot him, Willy! Shoot him, you pussy wimp shit motherfucker!” All the time I clocked on the streets of Chicago, you can see it in the eyes. I dunno what it is. Something dead in the eyes tells you the person behind the trigger means business. Willy didn’t have it. Not yet. I just took the gun away from him. I asked him: “This your friend?” By this time he’s crying. He’s just a kid. His brother, he tells me. “Your brother put you up to throwing that brick?” “Yessir,” he says. Walter chimes in: “Don’t talk to him, Willy! Just shut the fuck up!” Willy tells me Walter told him if he threw the brick at my car he’d get him a puppy. So Walter tells Willy: “No way you’re ever getting a puppy now, chicken shit!” Something died in Willy’s eyes just then. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Then he ran off. With my good leg, I kicked Walter across the jaw for that last crack. It’s a habit with me. I like to have the last word. Plus, this abusive crap breaks my heart, yunno?

When I got back that night, Joey’s sleeping on my family room couch, Connie’s laying a blanket over him. I ask her doesn’t this eightball ever go home? Right off the bat she lays into me: “Where the hell you been, Denny?” I tell her I’m a cop, it’s a 24-hour job. Then she sees all the blood. She helps me to the bathroom, starts tugging at my pants. I tell her: “I can do it, Connie! Christ, lay offa me!” A little too forceful, maybe, yeah. ’Cause where I been, what I done, I can’t stand her near me, touching me. She knows it, too, the way I can’t look her in the eye. Backing out she tells me: “All right, Denny, do it yourself! You’re the man of the family! Do everything yourself!” My pantleg was soaked with blood. In the middle of my right thigh was this deep black hole the size of a nut. I swung my right leg into the bathtub and grabbed the bottle of rubbing alcohol off the back of the toilet. I poured it on and my head went white all over again. But I didn’t scream, I didn’t shout. I bit hard into a towel and took it ’cause, I dunno, my sons were sleeping and they rely on me to be strong for them, yunno? And in a strange way, I was glad for the pain and wished it woulda hurt worse. I mean, I betrayed Connie that night and I felt deep down I deserved it.

JOEY: The bullet through Denny’s front window made perfect sense with all the dirt he’d gotten into lately out on patrol.

DENNY: I was on duty that night and me and Joey, we’d just, yunno, stopped by to grab something to eat, make sure the Nielsen boxes were working and good thing we did.

JOEY: The blood was from Stewart mostly. Stewy we call him. He’s Denny’s youngest. He’s about two.

DENNY: When the shards of glass fell, I couldn’t get to Connie and the kids as fast as Joey did on accounta my leg. And if Joey hadn’ta covered them the way he did, it coulda been much worse, believe me.

JOEY: Noel and Connie got cut up on their hands and arms from reaching out to cover their heads from the falling glass.

DENNY: I grabbed my holster, my service revolver off the coat hook by the door where I hung it when I come in. I woulda been more prepared, but on duty or not, Connie don’t like me wearing it around the house.

JOEY: Stewy got the worst of it. This one shard of window glass hit him along the side of the head.

DENNY: Time I limped out to the road, I saw the back end of this late model Le Mans, probably a ’89, maybe a ’90, no plates, hauling off, the back bumper tied on with rope and I know it was a Le Mans for sure ’cause me and Joey, as kids we used to hang out on the Dan Ryan overpasses and ID cars by their taillights. I was always better at it than Joey, no contest. I got off a shot or two. Maybe three or four. Heat of the moment, yunno, I don’t remember. I just wanted to put out a tire, shatter the back window and the back of the motherfucker’s skull too maybe. But all I did was ticked the plastic of one-a them taillights so it glowed a glint of white out one side-a the red like this demon eyeball. Then it vanished.

JOEY: What really made Denny nuts that night was Stewy wasn’t crying. He was just sitting on the couch, all this glass, the whole side of his head this slick of red, his pajamas soaked with it.

JOEY: I called 9-1-1 but instead of waiting for an ambulance, Denny told Connie to get Noel out into the patrolcar.

DENNY: I grabbed Stewy away from Joey and wrapped him up in a blanket ’cause I figured a legitimate emergency, I use the siren, the lights, I can get him to Mercy Hospital faster than any fuckin’ ambulance, right? That’s logical, isn’t that logical?

DENNY: I mean, what is it with some people? I got a legitimate emergency on the seat next to me here and they know the law, they see cherry lights, hear the siren, and still the self-absorbed motherfuckers don’t pull over! Everybody in so much a hurry to get some place, they think 15 seconds sooner makes all the difference!? Fuckin’ nuts is what it is.

JOEY: Talk about nuts, it was nuts too the way Denny wouldn’t let me or Connie hold Stewy while he was at the wheel, crazier the way he was driving, up on sidewalks, playing chicken with pedestrians. Even me, working the streets, I’d never seen so much blood. The blanket Denny had wrapped around Stewy was soaked like a sponge and Denny, driving like a madman, one-handed. Three people were hurt in that collision with the ambulance he caused when he charged a red light, the very ambulance that was on its way to help us, but Denny didn’t care. I was in the back with my arms around Connie and Noel, trying to talk them into keeping their breathing steady so they don’t hyperventilate. And no way Denny had to slug Connie like that to settle the argument, either. She wasn’t anywhere near berserk. She sided with me. That’s what ticked him off. She wanted him to wait for the ambulance, but he wanted to drive. But Denny had to do things his way. By the time we got Stewy into emergency at Mercy he was in shock.

DENNY: I hand Stewy over to the nurse and the way Connie’s looking at me, gashes on her arms, cut on her lip, it’s like she’s going into shock on me, too, like it’s all my fuckin’ fault or something. I mean their faces, Noel, too, they’re looking at me, blood draining from their faces, blue lips and shivering, your own family, you’re not God, not even a fuckin’ friend-a his, you can only do what you can fuckin’ do, yunno?

JOEY: Doctor came out after a few hours and told us the glass severed the artery along the side of Stewy’s neck and they had no way of knowing the effects, not till he comes out of anesthesia. He was critical but stable. Some nerve damage, maybe some brain damage. The doctors weren’t a hundred percent sure. Under two years old it’s hard to assess. Connie, she wanted to stay at the hospital the whole night but when they wouldn’t let her stay by Stewy in intensive care she went a little—

DENNY: A little? She was fuckin’ hysterical. And choosing this opportune moment to ride my ass, all a sudden Joey’s the only one she’ll listen to. He talked her into going home eventually.

JOEY: It took a long time to get Noel to sleep. He kept telling Denny, “I’m scared, Daddy, don’t go.”

DENNY: I fuckin’ spanked him. He’s my kid. You do ’em no fuckin’ favors raisin’ ’em to be tit-glomming mama’s boys, believe me.

JOEY: …I went into Noel’s room, put him up on my lap, read him a few stories, talked him down while Denny called the incident in.

DENNY: And, I’m sorry, it’s a blood thing. Joey’ll tell you I got obsessed. Maybe I did. But a wolf, any animal’ll kill to protect its young. Whatta you gonna tell a wolf tearing out your jugular ’cause you’re fuckin’ with its kids? You’re obsessed, Mr. Big-Bad, see a shrink, little couch time, get over it? Joey, he should be teaching Buddhism to Lutherans or something, him and his slippery fuckin’ slope. So I shakedown a half-dozen hookers working the North Avenue bridge once or twice a week. They got cash to spare and plenty-a ways to make up for lost income. I turn a head, permit human nature to progress its merry way, I keep the pimps off their backs, they stay freelance, and everybody’s happy. Protect and serve, that’s what I do. If not a plainclothes promotion, why not a little under the counter compensation for going above and beyond the call of duty on a regular basis?

DENNY: So a few days a week, in for a beer or two, I inquire about a barkeep’s liquor license. The proprietor slips me something under my glass to forget about it. Instant amnesia. It’s a community. I take care-a them, they take care-a me. Everybody gets along. Joey and me, though, we don’t always see eye to fuckin’ eye on this, but I tell the hard-liner, soon’s you find yourself a nice girl, settle down, pop a few long balls over the fence onto Wrightwood Avenue off your own bat, the world’ll look entirely different, my friend. Yunno what he tells me?

DENNY: My kid was hurt. One-a my babies. It’s something in the blood way beyond logic. Spill my kid’s blood, you spill my blood. It gets my blood up, I can’t help it. I filed a report on this drive-by, the make, the model, no plates, right taillight ticked like the eye of a demon and, sure, Dickerson, the yobber tells me follow protocol, Lombardo, let the dicks handle it.

JOEY: We were already skating on thin ice being over at Denny’s when we should’ve been out on duty. Top of that, using the patrolcar to get Stewy to Mercy, the accident along the way?

DENNY: Hey, it’s not like it coulda been avoided or anything. I mean, Christ, it was my kid’s life on the line. I told him: yessir, Captain Dickerson, proper channels, Captain Dickerson, everything by the book, Captain Dickerson. Like I’m gonna leave the safety of my family in the hands of the fuckin’ quota squad. Fuck that shit.

JOEY: Denny pulled the slug from a .44 Magnum out of the plaster behind his TV and sure, the dicks were pissed he messed with their crime scene. But Denny told them:

DENNY: This is my effin’ house and my effin’ TV and I do what the F I want and with the effin’ things in it. Capishe, gentlemen?

JOEY: A .44 Magnum could’ve been used by any number of characters Denny and I encounter on patrol. But the most likely scenario, Denny tells me…

JOEY: The pimp Denny beats up on a semi-regular basis for wailing on Rhonda.

DENNY: Pimps, it’s like a job requirement, these guys. First, they gotta be ugly as catshit and second they got themselves convinced they’re God’s gift to womankind. Okay, so most guys foot that bill. But on top it, pimps got this smell about ’em. I call it moral rot. You can actually smell the putrid way they think wafting off-a them like rotten flesh. I mean, they honestly think they’re helping these girls when actually they keep them enslaved, if not with drugs, with fear, and they reek of it. I mean, if they really wanted to help ’em, they’d do like Joey suggests and put ’em through beauty school or secretary school, something respectable, you know? But pimps, this pimp mentality, whatta they do? They take pot shots at my family through my fuckin’ front window.

JOEY: While Denny had it out with the detectives, I tried to calm down Connie. She was a nervous wreck. I told her try laying off the valium, but after Denny chased out the dicks, he told her she needed another and poured her half a glass of scotch to chase it down. By the time I finished reading “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” the fifth time to Noel, the 24-hour board-up guys were over chipping out the glass and nailing huge sheets of plywood up over what was left of Denny’s front window. I heard Denny out in the front yard in the rain shouting at the board-up guys. He was pissed they had their company name and phone number across the plywood in red ink and he was bickering with them about how much he was planning to bill them for the advertising. Connie was woozy from the valium, the scotch, and she walked in on me in Noel’s room, just as Noel was drifting off to sleep in my arms.

She waved me out of the room. I tucked Noel into bed and slipped out into the hallway. There, Connie whispered to me that the doctor had pulled her aside and told her that if Denny would have waited for the ambulance, Stewy’s blood loss could have been less severe and that the possible brain and nerve damage might have been reparable, if not preventable altogether. It was all a lot of maybes and I told Connie so and she said she knows but Denny does this all the time. He thinks he can do everything himself. She told me about his leg. Denny refused to go to the doctor for it. That’s the way he was. He wouldn’t take any money from Connie’s mom and dad for the house, the down payment, the mortgage, anything. No, Connie told me, Denny insisted on working two, sometimes three jobs to make ends meet. Denny never worked any two or three jobs. He barely worked the one. Unless you count in shaking down hookers and tavern keepers as sidelines. He’d stay out late and tell Connie he was moonlighting. And even though I knew Denny was out dicking around, putz that I am, I always covered for him. He was my best friend. My partner. Always back to back, me and Den. I’d been covering for him for so long, I couldn’t keep all the lies straight any more. So I told her. “Denny’s not working any 2 or 3 jobs, Con.” “All that money,” she asks me. “Where’s he getting it, Joey?” I didn’t answer right off. “I don’t want to know, do I?” she says. I say: “He’s taking care of his family.” Connie’s laugh was full of disgust. “This fat lip he gave me is taking care of his family? A bullet through our front window is taking care of his family? Stewy—?”

Connie kinda broke down and slumped into my arms. As I held her in the hallway that night to comfort her, it dawned on me why all the women I’d dated over the years had faded out of my life with a shrug. Holding Connie, the light, it gave me a strength I never had alone. She had no way of knowing it, but it was her gave me the strength to be comforting. She’s always telling me I’m so good to Denny, so good to her, so good to the kids, Heinz even. But it’s Connie, really. She has that kind of effect on me. It all comes from her. It always has.

With Stewy’s life in the balance, everything kind of opened up between us that night. I think Connie suspected the worst before I ratted Denny out. She just put up with Denny’s bullshit for the sake of the kids. Plus she loved him, too. I stood up at their wedding, no doubt about that. Connie could forgive Denny anything. For clocking her like he did, cutting her lip with that stupid faux Super Bowl pinky ring of his. She loved him that much. I did too, I guess. Kids, he’d beat the crap out of me daily. Summers, three times a day, more if we were really bored. I’d never cry or complain about it because if I did I was afraid Denny would stop being my best friend. The thought of that hurt worse than anything.

The board-up guys gone, Denny limped up the stairs. It wasn’t me holding Connie that got him suspicious as much as the fact that me and Connie both, we pulled away from each other the same second. We stood there off balance, this cloud of shame hanging between us because we both ratted Denny out and without exactly meaning to do so, allied against him. You know how you know someone so well, you can read them in an instant? Denny read the guilt on us as easy as we could read the suspicion in him.

I stayed on the couch that night. I’d done it a lot, lately. Even though I suspected he’d like to toss me out on my ear, Denny thought it was a good idea I play watchdog. Heinz was hiding under the bed in Noel’s room and wouldn’t come out. So I stood guard in case Walter Lorenz came back with something more potent than a .44 Magnum.