We Three Kings

Chapter 3-1

Chapter 3

It was the seventies, and it was Chicago, and there was punk rock and street-gangs and crime. We fit in as if we’d been born into it. There wasn’t a single thing we didn’t get into if the money was right. Surprisingly enough, we were good at it—making money, that is—and we were good at twisting the little bit we did make into more. At night it was on the streets: running packages for important people, shaking our fists at unimportant people who needed a reminder, driving jacked cars to unlit garages and making sure the wrong kind of girls got to the right kind of places and home again.

During the day, it was on the ever-present construction sites. We hadn’t had much in the way of learning with respect to the trades, but we had damn well learned how to work. The men we worked with respected that. If you had the balls to slug your fair share of the work, the men you slugged with would teach you: what tools to use, how to read blueprints; building codes, and when you had to use them and when you could try and get around them. It wasn’t just the how, it was the what and the why that got passed along, and we consumed the information like it was candy. For a while we couldn’t decide between the night work and the day work. We were still hard, still tough, and while the day work brought knowledge and fulfillment, the night work brought respect, prestige, and a whole lot of cash. Then Omet Palti, one of the old men on our construction crew, lost his son. He was told it was a case of wrong place, wrong time, but everybody knew it was just another dirty deed gone bad. Omet’s boy had taken up as a hood-for-hire with one of the new gangs that were trying to get a foothold on the neighborhood. He’d been sent into a local business with a scare warning and been wheeled out with a bullet hole. While the three of us had never been that close to the kid, we liked Omet. So, while he’d cried into his sangria and ranted over the state of the streets and the loss of souls, we listened.

We could be part of it, he told us, or we could learn from it. No matter what, he’d said—whatever had happened, whatever we’d done, wherever we’d been, and whatever we’d seen—if we allowed that to destroy our futures then we had no one to blame but ourselves. To succeed was choice, not destiny.