The Last Known Residence of Angelo Pulaski
The last known residence of Angelo Pulaski was not the Prospect Arms Hotel, 2025 Pere Marquette Blvd, room 2-D. Lock changed, personal effects—Cochise aftershave, four Old Style tallboys, Black Hawk middleweight championship (KO’d Chico Ortega round 9 inked on strap)—held as collateral for back rent.
Not held as collateral but just as inaccessible to Angelo Pulaski were those treasures he’d stashed under the mattress: studded rosewood nunchucks; yellowed photograph of Angelo Pulaski and his brother-in-law, Chico Ortega—both men shirtless, both men still in fighting shape, Ortega showing off newborn son like a trophy, Pulaski in similar pose with jug of gypsy wine—El Maestro 1 month? written on back; promotional flier for Davina Kipka when she was Club Beiderbecke’s feature dancer and not just a weeknight pole polisher, lipstick-smudged kiss over her name and phone number.
The last known residence of Angelo Pulaski was not the Locust Street projects, building A, apartment 521 where he’d shared Davina Kipka’s bed the nights she wasn’t on the pole at Club Beiderbecke.
Not apartment 524 with Remedios Ramírez who, though not a pole dancer, spun Angelo the right way during those solemnities when Davina swore herself off him forty days at a stretch. “Because,” Davina Kipka would tell the other dancers who hadn’t seen Angelo around the club in a while, “he breaks me like Lent.”
Angelo Pulaski’s last known residence was not the north stairwell of the Locust Street projects, Building A where he’d slept after Davina Kipka told him a thing or two about Remedios Ramírez and put him out for good this time.
First time he’d been locked out of room 2-D felt temporary. Luther Martini, Prospect Arms night manager, gimmicked up a padlock adverse to bolt cutters and tacked a thesis of unpaid days and weeks to the door. A kind of standing eight count. Just a pause, just a stutter-step, until Pulaski found his footing again.
“That flop’s for guys on the bum. Nothing aspirational about getting back there,” Angelo’s sister, Lorna, told him and laughed at his misfortune the way only another unfortunate could.
Because this was around the time Lorna’s man, Chico Ortega, split for Milwaukee and an old flame, a former ring girl who inherited a Mitchell Street tavern. Angelo bunked on Lorna’s frontroom sofa then. Watched his nephew, Maestro, for her while she picked up a second shift flipping burgers at Beef Chalet to cover Chico’s missing paycheck.
Not long after Chico bolted for Milwaukee, Al Vargas fired Angelo Pulaski from the peon work he’d been putting in at Vargas & Sons wrecking yard. Had some words with Angelo about sleeping on the job, about stashing car parts for the Trans Am he pipe-dreamed of rebuilding—Magnum T.A. Pulaski would christen it when he was finished. Al Vargas wove those jabs into combinations about Angelo’s fighting days. Punchy, palooka, has been, never was. That’s when they started chucking junk car parts at one another then dueling with rusty tailpipes across the wrecking yard and up Chicago Street, halfway to his old neighborhood.
Pulaski hadn’t set foot inside the house at 50 Leonard Street since he was sixteen. That house, just downwind of the LaSalle Ironworks, would be razed along with the neighboring ones, sold to a developer known for putting up liquor stores and currency exchanges around Black Hawk faster than the ironweed and bull thistle overran vacant lots.
Like the one across the street from Pulaski’s childhood home, an old shoe factory that burned to the ground and went to seed decades before he was born. Where Angelo Pulaski camped out as a boy, played in the ruins of the factory’s foundation and breached castle walls, repelled Confederate charges, scaled sheer cliff faces searching for Andean cloud cities.
Mythical places like the new subdivision in the forested highlands of Sauk Point. The place developers broke ground on but never completed. Bankruptcy or some legal tap-out absolved them from making restitution, from returning even modest down payments like Angelo and Davina’s. Nothing to reclaim, no one to prosecute.
The last known residence of Angelo Pulaski was not the holding cell of the Third Ward precinct or the drunk tank at the city jail on Foothill Road.
His last known residence was not the back booth at the Acorn Inn tavern where regulars could nod off before hitting the bricks. Not the crash pad above the Acorn Inn, a room with no lock and no number, a room with the word ROOM spray-painted on the door.
From that room’s grimy window, one could just make out the blighted elms lining blocks of bungalows where babushkas and abuelitas staked chains around their patches of grass—green thumb rosaries to ward off dogs and delinquents.
Which didn’t stop someone from passing out in Bitsy Cantú’s front yard Saturday night. Angelo Pulaski or some tavernrat wino, who could be sure?
Even those kids old enough to remember Angelo, not for his days in the ring but for the Indiana fireworks run he’d make for them every July, couldn’t vouch that it was Pulaski and not just another punched-up martyr like the ones in the windows at St. Alphonsus.
Where his nephew (“Maestro” his uncle always called him) lights a votive for Angelo Pulaski, recalls his uncle’s advice about taking a punch, about never jumping up after a knock down. Better to slow roll it because only suckers fight for points. Get your wind. Come up swinging. Chase that knockout.
DAN MANCILLA lives Elgin, Illinois, where he is a professor of English at Elgin Community College. He is the author of the short story collection All the Proud Fathers (Dock Street Press) and the novella The Deathmask of El Gaucho (Little Presque Books/Passages North). His writing has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Barrelhouse, Midwestern Gothic, Slice Magazine, River Styx, Copper Nickel, Hobart, The Malahat Review, Washington Square Review, and The Saturday Evening Post, among other publications.
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