Open Window

It lets things in.

Have I mentioned that the nice weather lets me keep the window open? It does. And I hear more things than usual. Late last night it was a guy in a muscle car, parked at the light, idling, gunning his engine, letting the colors cycle through green then back to yellow and red. The second green light was to his liking and he left. I couldn’t fully see him but he looked older.

*

OUR LEADER

Red Ronnie was holding court. “Anyone in our neighborhood wasn’t supposed to be there, that person was in it.” One of the other guys nodded. “Right,” he said. “They weren’t in it and then they were.” Red Ronnie stopped him. “No,” he said. “That person was in the shit, they were in deep. They were in big trouble.” He kicked out at the guy from the open front car door. His leg couldn’t reach but the message did. “Man, we had a real neighborhood protection program going. We had eyes and spies, enforcers and sources, a whisper network that could reach headquarters in thirty seconds. And this was headquarters.” He patted his black Trans Am, screaming eagle decal across the hood, eighteen-inch snowflake wheel rims, rear window louvers. It had a five-hundred horse small-block V8 also, but that didn’t matter, since Red Ronnie rarely drove it. He sat in it, headquartered, and let the neighborhood come to him. He had been that way since ’82 and he was still that way now, even though he had gained forty pounds and lost most of his hair and seen the rise and fall of several disruptive forces in the streets around him. The worst of them, the Flickers, had been into everything, and worse than everyone else: the dealing, the stealing, the killings to keep the rest going. Red Ronnie had summoned all his tactical intelligence to put them down. The story was a legend and one he liked everyone else to tell, but when it got to him, he’d make a big show of modesty. “I just needed this to be a safe place for my kids.” He had no kids. Red Ronnie had been in the war, though he wouldn’t say which, and he was blind in one eye and deaf in the other ear. He had hands that shook and scaly skin across his neck. He played the radio when he wasn’t in council, Irakere loud as hell. When he was young he had a woman, Carmen, who was taken from him by the neighborhood. The way he talked about it, you’d think she fell in the streets, but the fact was that a Flicker boss had tempted her away. He had stepped to Red Ronnie in the street, shoved him, kicked him until he got tears, and Carmen had liked what she saw. She was still married to the guy. They had grandkids now, lived in a house on the second hill. The car was named for her, not as dumb a name as it sounded, he’d always say, because that meant hope. “But still a dumb name,” he’d say, and he could laugh, but no one else could. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]