UNCLE CLYDE IN THE FIRST WARD: ROOM 201, MRS. K
FOR INTRODUCTORY INFO ON UNCLE CLYDE'S CHICAGO, SEE 'UNCLE CLYDE IN THE FIRST WARD:CH 1', BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
*****
Uncle Clyde told me this one during a Birthday party for my Cousin Greg, who's an Asshole. Greg hates my guts too, so we're allright with each other. Uncle Clyde also hates Greg, but he hates everybody in the family, except me and my Step sister Sadie.
"No kidding? You like Sadie?" I asked him.
"Yeah, great kid! She got me Sox tickets when everyone else was getting me Life Alert Bracelets. And she reminds me of a tenant in that building I was telling you about."
"Hold on, Clyde, let me refill your glass..."
"So, Sadie's got that Long Blonde hair like a damn Norse Goddess, right? And that fine ass...yeah, I know she's family, but Damn Daley in Hell, we gotta call a spade a spade unless my friend Ted's in the room, cause he's black and he takes that shit seriously, so then...we'll call it a trowel. But your step sister's ass was just like the Girl in room 201. . ."
So I'm 22 and I'm the building supervisor in a brownstone owned by Alderman Hinky Dink McKenna in the First Ward of Chicago Lots of guys called Hinky Dink crooked, and they were dead right. Lotsa guys called him the finest man they knew, and they were even more right. It was Chicago in 1910, and you gotta remember that in the First Ward, prostitution and other stuff that usually ain't legal, was legal as all get out! Now I worked for Hinky Dink, and I ran his building, but most of the tenants were respectable folk. I didn't Cadet for the whores or nothing like that. However there was one of them New Telephones in the back room on the first floor, but the girls only used it during Conventions and Holidays.
It had been just a couple days since I got my first rent discount from Mama Rosetti, I told you about that last time. Mama had kept her word, and everything was hunky dory with her, we got along fine and she even joked about our time together, but still kept her distance while other people were around and when it was just us, like proper ladies did back then.
So Mrs Kracowski sent word that her sink was broken, again. There was this weird turn the pipes made in the building which gave her faucets the squirts, ah, intermittant water pressure is what the son-of-a-bitch 100$ a fucking hour plumbers call it now. Her husband's a engineer on a passenger steamer that cruises Lake Michigan. He was a good joe, but he was gay. Yeah, weird to think there were Fags...sorry, LGBTQ folk back in 1910, ain't it? Sure, there was more than you think, people just like Jerzi. Now we didn't know it for a while, but we figured it out a few years later. He had to keep that kind of thing secret back then. You'd lose your job, your friends...shit, they'd beat people to death over that kind of thing.
So I'm fixing the pipes, and I'm making some progress and I hear sobbing coming from the other room. I crawl out from under the sink and peek into the bedroom. Mrs Kracowski was looking out the window, tears streaming down her face, her arms folded in front of her. She had that golden blonde hair like a lot of women from Poland do, and she had it up in those complicated braids that made me think of Christmas sweet breads, She was fresh from Poland, she and Jerzy. They had emigrated right after their marriage, and although she got the language down pat, hell, she talked better than me, she was still kinda finding her way.
She had her peasant's dress on, something she only wore in the apartment, so they wouldn't make fun of her in the streets for being a bumpkin. It suited her slender build and strong shoulders, and the half sleeves showed off her tanned supple arms. The loose cotton material was open in the front, and showed more cleavage than was custom for back then. It took a lot of effort not to sneak a peak. At the moment though, I was just trying to figure out what the hell the trouble was and if I was the cause of it.
"Mrs Kracowski, are you okay? You want me to leave?"
"Am I an ugly woman? Do I disgust men? Do I disgust you, Mr. Clyde?"
She said the last sentence right at me, and the idiocy of that lovely blue eyed face asking me something like that made me laugh out loud, and that made her yell at me.
"Don't laugh at me, Mr. Clyde! I'm being very serious!"
"Oh Come on Mrs K, how can you be? You're not just pretty, your gorgeous and . . . look, we're here alone and I don't want to say anything that ain't proper. . .
"Oh pieprzyć! Please, please for the love of my sanity would you say something that ain't proper?"
"What?" was my brilliant response.
"I was raised on a farm killing chickens and watching cows screw since I was nine. I had five brothers who screwed more than the cows did. Then I come here, surrounded by people who don't talk about anything and a husband that won't touch me unless i get him drunk and attack him."
"Oh wow, hey, I like Jerzy and I don't think..."
"Of course you like him, you don't have to live with him. Everybody likes him!" She was yelling now, not a hysteric yell but more of a mad angry yell, the venting kind of yell, like I've hear men do all the time. "I like him too. But I am living like a Nun. Like a Priest. Like a corpse!" She was waving her arms about and moved to stand between me and the window. The afternoon sun fell on her back, and silhouetted her legs and hips under her thin cotton dress, proving she had no underskirts on, and that was rare as hell in that time. "So will you please say something that ain't proper. That's crude, that's rude, something that will make want to slap you!!"
First Ward kids always take a dare.
"Is your fanny as sweet as your tits?"