Mick Ballou looks at real life

One of the great characters in the Matthew Scudder books is Mick Ballou who is the crime boss of the West Side. Half Irish and Half French he is a frequent presence in the novels. He owns "Grogan's" a typical West Side Irish pub of the old school. Just like one of the ones I used to hang out in back in the day.

Hells Kitchen was one of the last bastions of the Irish in New York City. The Westies were the last remnant of the Irish gangs like the Dead Rabbits and the Hudson Dusters that went pack hundreds of years in the history of the City. The last real significant gangster was Owney Madden who left for Hot Springs in the 1930's. The Italians pushed them out. There were still gangsters but they were concentrated in places like the stage hand union and the Javitts convention center. There was a resurgence of the Irish in the 1970's and 1980's under the leadership of Jimmy Coonan who had a relationship with the Gambinos. His right hand man Mickey Featherstone eventually sold him out and all of those guys went to prison. They made a movie about it with Ed Harris and Sean Penn.

In 1978 I started working as a baby accountant. One of my accounts was Buddy's Auto Repair of 11th Avenue around 36th Street. Buddy was an old school Irishman and I am pretty sure he paid off the Westies. At least these tough looking hoods would come to whisper to him and they would walk around the corner. Buddy used to boil out radiators in taxicabs to find the leaks and then they would weld them shut. Taxicabs were pieces of junk back then. Held together with spit and bailing wire. Nowadays they have computers and credit card machines and tv's in the fuckin back seat and everything is mandated and regulated by the government.

Buddy had two black dudes working for him. Eddie and Jimmy Gourdine. Eddie was a Vietnam Vet and a stone junkie. He would work in the morning while he was feeling mellow but would need to fix in the afternoon and would nod out on a chair. One day I wanted to take a piss and opened the bathroom door and Eddie was nodded out on the toilet with a spike in his arm. Jimmie looked just like the dude in "The Shining" and sounded just like him. Jimmie used to bring his lunch everyday and always ate some sort of animal part. A bird or something but nothing like any chicken I ever saw. He would always heat it up and offer me some but I would never eat any. I ate some disgusting things in the Chinese restaurants but eating the wing or leg of an animal I couldn't identify was not gonna work for me. You see I noticed that whenever Jimmie would walk outside all the pigeons would fly away. It was weird.

Anyway after I wrote out all the taxes every once in a while we would go out for a drink in a local ginmill that was very much the same as "Grogan's" where we would line up a shot of Jamesons and a Reingold back. There were quite a few guys who looked like Mick Ballou or Andy Buckley or some of the other gangsters that Lawrence Block sketches so deftly in his books. They were into their own business and never bothered us. Of course Buddy was a fixture in the neighborhood and he paid his dues. And his protection. When I read the Scudder stories I am taken back to those days in the late '70's and early '80's. It was a different world. A different life.

The stories in "The Night and the Music" take me back to those times. It is like I am sitting next to Mick Ballou. And the craic is good. The music is on the juke box. The smokey flavor of the Jameson and the bracing rush of the ice cold beer.

I can just taste it.