My Friend Kenneth
By Michael Woyan
Page 1 sex Page 2 drugs Page 3 sin Page 4 lust Page 5 envy Page 6 fortune Page 7 evil Page 8 pirate Page 9 thief

For my first couple of years at the apartment I enjoyed a very symbiotic relationship with the bar and it's staff. During this period, the bank with which I was employed saw fit to withhold my commissions from time to time, blaming it on the accounting difficulties that come with a merger. Finding their cash flow challenges at my expense a bit more than taking one for the home team, I also naively believed it to remain a worthwhile opportunity; I took a job at a local nightclub with an early liquor license as a doorman for extra and dependable money. I would often bring young patrons back to the apartment for a nightcap after the bars had closed only to find myself without sufficient reserves. When I found myself in these circumstances, I was able to walk downstairs through the basement and up back into the bar after it closed to purchase never-to-be-mentioned six packs of beer from a bartender with whom I had become particularly friendly.
One very late night after the Ale House had closed, I was once again in those circumstances with a young lady waiting for libatory relief upstairs while I made the familiar trek through the basement and back upstairs to the bar, when I discovered that it wasn't my friendly bartender cleaning up, but a huge, completely frightening transsexual of a woman with demonic eyes and a scream like thunder. I returned screams in pure terror and ran back upstairs empty-handed to my soon to be dateless apartment. She managed to have me barred for life from a dubious establishment that embraced any and all of Old Town's in-between characters but me.
Well, Ken was not going to take this one lying down. He proceeded to march me downstairs to the Ale House with immediate dispatch and confronted the bartenders with a resolve I'd not yet seen from him and an ultimatum. He threatened to no longer patronize his favorite, most similar to the pubs at home place of drink, The Old Town Ale House, unless I was reinstated. With Ken's steely stare and their endless silence the bartender finally cracked, allowing me to have a drink, just this once. After this concession, of course Kenneth was not going to stop there. They said that if the owner said it was OK, then I would be granted permanent reinstatement. Kenneth stood firm, and aside from the fact that the offended she-male in question no longer lived in Chicago, I was again accepted among the "Old Town Irregulars" and allowed to drink among the chronically over-served. In truth, the significance here is that once again fresh possibilities were opened up to me in terms of plugging in to the creative community I'd denied myself all these years. Armed with Kenneth's wide reach of compassion for the imperfect, I was now provided with an abundance of stories about the lives of the often forgotten, unappreciated and the in-between, enriching my life beyond what I'd thought possible with conversations of authors I'd never read, jazz musicians I'd never heard, and art I'd never seen. Some time had passed after this, and my friends began to refer to me dubiously as the "Mayor of Old Town" because I couldn't walk down the street without being greeted by several locals with whom I'd probably either done business or had a drink.
Months passed as we got to know one another better and better in that continuous state of transfiguration one can only experience when acutely alert in one's life, and I learned about his family, his hopes, his ambitions and his fears. I benefited greatly from his remarkable sense of story and talent for the telling of them. I introduced Kenneth to the greats in jazz, of which Coltrane and Miles stirred his Irish soul the most profoundly. Once considered a great newspaper town, we discussed the inferior quality of Chicago's newspapers to its more international counterparts, The London Times and The New York Times. If it were late enough at night and if we'd shared enough good cheer, we'd call his sister Cora in Galway as she was making breakfast for her children taking advantage of the time difference and her generous nature. I also came to learn why he would mysteriously disappear Saturday mornings and not return until Sunday early evenings for Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.
It seems that Kenneth had family residing on the south side of Chicago. In addition to various aunts and uncles, Kenneth has three brothers, two of whom are married, with children and are in the contracting business; the third, Bernard was described as troubled and the subject dropped. Kenneth also worked weekends for a family friend who owned a questionable bar that will remain unnamed, because like many such out-of-the-way neighborhood establishments in Chicago, there was a small book being run out of the back room. A Chicago tradition for over one hundred years, I never heard whether or not one could get a game of cards there, but I doubt it. Regardless the trivial size of the book, the McCarthy family friend always considered it a personal favor that Kenneth would keep the bar for him on weekends because he could be trusted. In fact, I knew this to be true.

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