Settling Old Scores: BWWM Second Chance Romance (5 page)

For
the most part, they were quite impressed. Mr. Sharpe was blown away.
He was a classic former marine that had learned his math old school
style. There was one way, and one way only to do things. That one way
didn't include the technique that Kevin was using. So, Kevin was
opening him up to a new style that tied algebra and arithmetic
together. He instantly got it too, and was quite enthused. Then,
Kevin launched into a short description of how he used geometry,
math, and trigonometry to make his living as a Second Mate. The kids
loved it. You could see them just sponging up everything.

Mr.
Sharpe was exuberant afterward. "You ought to be a teacher. You
really got these kids going today," he pitched Kevin.

"I
don't know if I have the patience, and besides I make a pretty good
living in my current profession," Kevin said.

"I
know you are here for only four months, but would you come back here
in a couple of months and pay us another visit?" he asked.

"I
will do that. I promise," Kevin said.

Kevin
told him about his math experiences after going to inner city
schools. "One day, I was taking Calculus and I couldn't even
spell it for Christ's sake. There were kids there from private school
that had this stuff in high school. Don't ever assume public
education can match what some of these kids had. So, now you know why
I became a mate, and not a marine engineer," Kevin said to Mr.
Sharpe.

Then
Kevin told him about the time he met a cadet mariner from the Russian
Merchant Marine in Istanbul. Fortunately, the cadet spoke English,
and so they visited each other’s ships. Kevin even took a movie
projector over to their ship and showed them a John Wayne Western.
The Russian Crew loved John Wayne, especially when he got in a fight
with the bad guy and kicked his butt. He knocked the bad guy out of a
wagon, then jumped down to the ground pulled the bad guy up by his
lapels and continued to beat the shit out of him. The crew loved it.
Male love for violence must be universal Kevin thought.

Later,
when he and the Russian talked shop, they learned they used pretty
much the same textbooks for stuff like Navigation. Bowditch,
The
American Practical Navigator,
was
the textbook they both used for navigation.
Stability
& Trim for the Ship's Officer,
was
another shared text. In math, they were light years apart though. The
Russian cadet studied out of an old 150 page calculus book. Kevin's
was a 600 page monster book, but guess who knew their math better?
The Russian, that's who. Kevin laughed as he told the story.

"That's
when I figured out that the capitalist system wasn't working so good
for education, comrade. Ironically, in the capitalist system, these
professors have an army of slave labor called Teaching Assistants.
They have big egos too. The publishers sort of get paid by the weight
of the book. The bigger, the better. So, we end up with these mine is
bigger than yours books that eventually end up discouraging students
from science & math," he concluded.

The
cadet did give him a book in English about Trachtenberg Speed Math,
and another one about Vedic Math. The books made Kevin a believer in
these techniques which were in fact what he had just shown these
kids. Kevin in turn gifted him his 600 page mega book.

"By
the way Mr. Sharpe," Kevin asked as they cleaned up the boards
after the meeting, "who was the blond ninth grader in the second
row? She was a dead ringer for someone I used to know that lived in
this neighborhood."

"That's
Marcy Greenberg. She lives with her grandmother somewhere up there
off of Kansas Avenue," he said.

As
soon as he said the last name, Kevin made the instant connection. The
person she was a dead ringer for was her mother Sylvia! When he heard
her speak, he had one of those "Where have I heard that voice
before moments?" Kevin didn't have to search his memory much to
bring to mind Sylvia and the last time he saw her, or Marcy. He
remembered that picture he had of them, too.

"Holy
shit, it's no wonder she looks familiar; she is a dead ringer for her
mother, and even more scary she sounds like her mother too!"
Kevin said.

Kevin
told Mr. Sharpe the story of his prior relationship with Sylvia and
Marcy Greenberg. It ended with the burning of the grocery story they
lived above.

"You
don't know the rest of the story, do you? You may have been one of
the last persons to have seen her alive," Mr. Sharpe said.

Then
he proceeded to tell Kevin that Marcy's mom just about disappeared
the night of the burning. No one had ever seen her since. No bodies
were never found in the rubble. They sort of suspected foul play but
could never prove it. The detectives nosing around in the matter
after the riots concluded that Sylvia was augmenting her AFDC income
by part time freelance prostitution.

Mr.
Sharpe went on to say that riots were good opportunities to settle
old scores, too. He said a lot of people did just that during this
eruption more than ten years earlier. He said it so knowingly that
Kevin knew that they needed to have a talk. Kevin asked him if he
could stop and see him when he got off work. Seeing that Kevin was
upset, he agreed. He told Kevin to meet him in the break room of the
AA chapter he belonged to.

10.
Marginal Costs

As
Kevin drove to classes after his math club appearance, he pondered
about what he had just learned. Something didn't add up for him. He
kept turning things over in his mind. When Kevin started in the
Merchant Marine, he learned to drink hard liquor. It was very
inexpensive and generally duty free. Then, he started out by trying
Scotch. He didn't like the ash-tray taste it left him with. He
switched to Irish whiskey. That brought out a gloom that he didn't
like either. It was like “
Hello
Darkness My Old Friend
”
with
every single shot. He discovered good-quality bourbon. He could get
it in proofs in excess of 100; the taste was good, no more melancholy
thoughts. It never seemed to turn him into a Wild Turkey, either.
Kevin liked that line when he said it to someone.

He
carried the Bourbon habit forward into his graduate school life. Some
people pray before they go to bed. Kevin wasn't about to do that; he
had given up religion after he came back from Vietnam. Instead, Kevin
generally had a double shot of bourbon on the rocks before going to
bed. He also kept a notepad and pen handy. He was an inveterate list
maker. As he mentally journalized his day, he also made notes about
things he wanted to accomplish going forward.

Kevin's
reasoning was that the marginal cost of a single idea at the end of
the day was zero. In MBA speak, it means that an extra idea at the
end of the day was free. You would be a damn fool not to stimulate
them and write them down as they occurred. That was pretty much what
the routine was about. He had crafted a routine that encouraged him
to take some quiet time every day, and to discipline himself to write
out the better thoughts that came to him.

After
classes, Kevin went back to the apartment. Today was definitely a
double shot day, to be followed up later on with a double shot
nightcap. Pat was gone. He was hoping he would find her still there.
So Kevin got the bourbon out and started to sip a double as he
thought about his day thus far. It finally occurred to Kevin as he
sat there that he was not nearly as street smart as he thought. One
time, he had taken a Briggs Meyer test that amongst lots of negative
things, said he was off the charts in reading people, and street
smarts. He always accepted those results at face value. Now, he
really wondered about the findings.

How
had he missed that Sylvia was a prostitute? It all made sense as he
thought about it. The filmy nightgowns she wore at times. The
provocative wardrobe, the perfume, and the haunting line about not
ending up like her; it all calculated. The math reference “it
calculated” was taunting his inability to see what was
blatantly obvious now that he looked at it in his rear view mirror,
more than ten years later. He hated being taunted.

He
thought about the street smarts angle. Maybe, Mr. Sharpe really knew
more than he said. He was generally an open book, but you had to ask.
Mr. Sharpe was not an idle gossip guy. In retrospect, Kevin revised
his thinking and admitted that he needed to go back and review what
he thought he knew. Including what he thought he knew about Pat.
Being overconfident and assuming things. We all know what happens
when you do that, Kevin thought.

One
thing for sure he did know was the neighborhood around the Avenue
better than anyone else. In the old days, if you gave him an address
in about a two square mile area around the Avenue, he could tell you
what the house looked like. Who lived there, what they did for a
living. How much glass was in the alley behind the house? He could
tell you what kind of car they drove, and if they had a dog or not.
He knew if they had kids & approximately how old they were. Many
of those details had changed in the last 10 years, but some hadn't.
There was something nagging at him that he couldn't fit into place.

He
hoped that Pat was still in the apartment; she had a great memory
too. Kids always take in things adults miss and what kids miss,
adults sometimes register, he thought. It was going to take the kid
memory and adult reasoning to figure this one out. He took out the
old picture taken at the grocery store and studied it. Clearly, Marcy
did not remember Kevin today. He didn't want her to remember him; he
hoped she remembered her mother, though. The young pretty, smiling
one in the picture.

Kevin
threw out his almost untouched bourbon. He didn't want to show up at
his AA Chapter lounge reeking of alcohol. Ironically, the chapter was
across the street from the VFW where plenty of veterans still drank
hard, regularly. His dad had been a regular there for years.

Then
he went on down to the AA chapter to meet Mr. Sharpe. He took the bus
instead of driving. When he got there, Mr. Sharpe was sitting there
drinking coffee and working on his second pack of unfiltered Pall
Malls for the day. He greeted Kevin, poured him a cup of coffee, and
took him to a private room.

"You
looked upset when I told you about Marcy today. You must have more
questions," he said.

"Yeah,
I do have questions. You said that riots are good opportunities for
people to settle scores. I don't doubt that they are. Is there
something specific you know and can tell me about?" said Kevin.

Mr.
Sharpe started out by saying he couldn't prove anything, but from his
years in the neighborhood, he knew of three guys that probably
settled some scores during the burning and looting. The three names
were not unknown to Kevin. One was a thug that specialized in the
drug trade. His name was Jesse Campbell, and he was a bad man.
Everyone knew that he had his crew raid and torch the two pharmacies
on the Avenue when it was burned. He ended up with a stash of
prescription narcotics out of the deal. In those days, the merchants
always kept them under lock and key in a separate area. A smash and
grab of those would take someone who knew the layout about 30 seconds
for 4-5 thousand dollars worth of drugs. A second raider could get
the pain killers like Percodan and stuff like that in 30 seconds,
too. Then a small fire could be left to start while the unruly mob
cleared the shelves of merchandise.

Nobody
could ever prove it, of course. Just about nothing was left after the
fires consumed the buildings. In that neighborhood, people never talk
to the police. Kevin always wondered if the fire marshal ever really
did a good investigation after the riot. It would be labeled a rubber
stamp arson case and that was it. The thought made him wonder about
Sylvia; did anyone ever really go through the rubble looking for her
body?

The
second name Mr. Sharpe mentioned was Tyrone Jenkins, the owner of the
black barber shop, Kevin used to deliver to. He ran a betting and
numbers business out of the barber shop. It was news to Kevin who was
too young back then to catch stuff like that. Again, it hit him what
a dope he had been not to pick up on this. Just as with Sylvia's real
profession, he missed it completely. The whole time, he thought the
customers were guys that just liked to talk sports. Now, it turned
out to be way more than that. Mr. Sharpe said that several of the
black business owners were burnt out the second night of the riots
because of failure to pay gambling debts. Then, it hit Kevin that
maybe the funeral home was burnt for this reason.

The
third name was actually two brothers, Sam and Donny McCann. They were
in the sex trade. Donny was the classic pimp of the Avenue. He had
the gold, the wardrobe, the enormous Coupe de Ville with sixties
style fins that Kevin always admired. He was a bad, mean man. His
brother was the enforcer in the partnership, and probably the brains.