We’ve just celebrated Valentine’s Day, that exceptional, manufactured holiday to sell more Hallmark® cards and show our devotion to the special someone we love, usually by showering her (since I’m writing this from a reasonably normal man’s point of view) not with water, unless she’s extremely dirty, but with chocolate hearts, sugary consumables, and other red stuff. This presumably will give her a warm feeling in her heart for the showering (if he’s extremely dirty) male, and leave the showering male with a warm feeling for having given her a warm feeling toward him even though he may have placed her in a prediabetic state of health, unless all the warmth spread around has melted the sugary consumables thereby avoiding the need for insulin. Maybe she’d rather just be tied up and flogged.
I myself choose to celebrate the yearly recurrence of the day of love and kisses by watching (much to my wife’s chagrin) The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen the film since first viewing it in the theater in 1967. A couple of my school friends and I were big violence junkies and beguiled by The Untouchables on the tube. They were all agog to tell me that I had to see this movie with the massive amount of gunfire ending with a pile of bleeding bodies on a Chicago garage floor. I took their advice and it gave me a whole new perspective on Valentine’s Day.
My mother must share responsibility for the gangster monomania in my life (I don’t know where my two friends got it from). Although she never toted a tommy gun around or used one (except when someone refused to buy a box of Girl Scout cookies from her), but she did regale me with stories of growing up on the near northwest side of Chicago during the Roaring ‘20s. On her way to school, she and her younger sister stopped to look at the blood of Hymie Weiss in front of Holy Name Cathedral just across the street from Dean O’Banion’s flower shop, not long after Dean went to sleep with his tulips. She and other neighborhood kids would hear of local bad guy bootleggers who’d been sent to the big brewery in the sky, then quickstep over to see how much blood was left behind in the street or on the sidewalk. Her recounting ended with the famous massacre on Clark Street.
In her grade school choir, she sang with Frankie Laine (Mule Train, Rawhide), whose father was Al Capone’s personal barber. Rival mobsters had sent Frankie’s grandfather to do his brewing for the angels. My mother took my sister and me to meet Frankie when we were kids. They talked about school days, but not about Frankie’s family.
In my teen years, it was with a modicum of pride that I would drive friends past mob boss Tony “Big Tuna” Arcado’s home. I learned the location from the in-laws of my sister. The two families had been friends in the old country since the 1890s, and her father-in-law was Tony’s barber. (Does it seem to you there’s a lot of hair cutting going on within the Mob?)
Later in my early 20s, a partner and I bought an abandoned bowling alley on Cermak in Cicero a block-and-a-half-from Capone’s Hawthorne Hotel. We could look out our front door and see it, just bullet’s distance away. In the basement of the bowling alley, we discovered a blocked-off entrance, which, naturally, we unblocked. Under a half-inch of dust were six cubicles containing army-type bunks with mattresses and pillows still in place. Another hidden closet was loaded with bottles of booze. Was this some type of mobster hideout? Some type of dust bunny holocaust? Who knows? Geraldo Rivera would have had a more interesting television special opening this vault, rather than the anti-climatic one at Al’s Lexington Hotel.
Hard to believe that I’ve gotten off track again, but you see how Valentine’s Day and the associated massacre has a special place in my heart alongside the love, candy hearts, and bullets. I hope your day was filled with smiles and offers you couldn’t refuse.