Mob Ratbag Read online

  MOB RATBAG

  L.R. STARR

  Copyright © 2021 by L. R. STARR

  First Edition 2021

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or by electronic process other than for ‘fair use’ as defined by law, without the prior written permission of the author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Mob Ratbag

  1. Chantelle

  2. Sam

  3. Chantelle

  4. Sam

  5. Chantelle

  6. Sam

  7. Chantelle

  8. Sam

  9. Chantelle

  10. Sam

  11. Chantelle

  12. Sam

  13. Chantelle

  14. Sam

  15. Chantelle

  16. Sam

  17. Chantelle

  18. Sam

  About the Author

  Also by L.R. STARR

  Mob Ratbag

  By L.R. Starr

  “You can cover up shit with maple syrup, but underneath it’s still shit.” ~ Sam Mortellini

  1

  Chantelle

  It’s a cold world out here. You better get a jacket. Life can be so wintry cold that sometimes you never thaw out. That’s what my existence felt like sometimes. I was too young for the shitstorm I was born into. Too young for all these bricks stacked on my back. I couldn’t enjoy my childhood and just be a goddamn kid. I wanted to play too, to live, to laugh, to make mistakes, to fall apart and put myself back together again and rest in the safety of the arms of my mother. Not my life. There was no clothes shopping at the mall with friends and weeping over loser boys. No time. I ended up being responsible for everything, and everyone. I had to be otherwise me and my sister didn’t eat. We were left to our own lacking devices, exposed to the stark, harsh truths of this earth from the early days of childhood.

  Who else was going to take care of me and Lacey?

  Sure as hell wasn’t going to be our hippified parents. I was in my last and my most crucial year at Lexon private school in Boston, Massachusetts. The school was a hell drag at times, but I’d been given an opportunity that I was eternally grateful for.

  I could have been a street kid. But somehow, some way, me and my sister made it out of the system.

  Nine months is how long I had to go. The same amount of time as a pregnancy, and not that I knew about that. My head stayed permanently fixated in one of my textbooks. One more year as a senior with all the catty over-privileged bitches. I sucked in through my teeth as the thought came to mind.

  I was sitting cross legged in my tiny apartment, cupping a bowl of chicken soup thinking about these things. The school year was about to start, and my mind drifted haphazardly to all me and Lacey had gone through.

  How did I get the apartment?

  I worked my butt off, became emancipated from my parents at eighteen along with the help of my foster carer, and covered back-to-back shifts at my local grocery store. That emancipation part only worked because my parents were charged with severe abandonment and neglect.

  We used to scavenge and sneak cans of soup off the store shelves. Lacey used to carry a plastic bag and keep it open for me as I slid items off the shelf and into the bag so we could eat for the night. Thank god Mr. Leung didn’t take offense when I confessed to him what we did years later. I even offered to pay it all back.

  “No, you keep that Chantelle. You had no food! I understand. I’m glad that you came to work here. Meant to be.” Mr. Leung was a compassionate Chinese immigrant with a bald head and a huge toothless grin. He’d migrated to Boston seventeen years prior. He and his wife came from poverty themselves and understood Lacey and I’s predicament. Everyone in the neighborhood knew and loved him. Including me. School kids came in and bargained for candy and treats on most days. He loved the kids; it made his day come alive.

  “No Tommy! I told your mother I wouldn’t give you any more treats. Your teeth will fall out. No more! You will be toothless like me. See!” He would point to his teeth and the kids would recoil for a moment as they glimpsed into their toothless futures. I would stack the shelves with the soup cans and watch him fussing over the neighborhood kids. They liked to mess with him and stack the cans into piles in the middle of the aisles. Ironic that those same cans that I stole I could now afford and stacked most nights.

  I started working at fifteen and took back-to-back shifts in the summertime. Mr. Leung loved me, and we got along well. He had an appreciation for hard workers. I was his favorite, and he gave me extra shifts gladly. One day I was so bone tired that I felt my lids drooping in the aisle. I fell asleep right there on the stool. He was standing over me with his hands on his hips. He tapped me on the shoulder, jolting me awake. I was sure slobber was running down my face.

  “You know, you’re one of my hardest workers here. This is why I give you shifts. But sometimes, you need to take a break. You’re a young girl. Big life ahead.” He made a large circle with his arms and a broken Chinese accent.

  “I know, Mr. Leung. I just have to get a few more shifts for my sister and me. I can nearly afford a bigger place. I want to get her out of the foster care system. Please don’t send me home,” I pleaded with him.

  He huffed at me loudly. “You sleep on the clock. You must rest. You go home now, and tomorrow you can do a double shift. Kay?” he commanded abruptly with a sharp swipe of his hand in the air.

  “But-” I persisted with my hopeless cause against Mr. Leung. Once he made his mind up that was it.

  “No butts here. Only the one I kick if you don’t go now!” He waved his striped tea towel at me, sending me home. Mr. Leung made me laugh at times with his funny ways. Another small thing I could be grateful for in life.

  Lacey and I had been through the wringer and then some. We grew up on edge not knowing our futures or where we’d land.

  At eighteen, I managed to get myself a small apartment across the tracks in a Boston walk-up. The place was a far cry from Lexon private school, where I held an academic scholarship.

  Manicured lawns and preppy rich kids who didn’t know the meaning of poverty existed there and I doubted if they would ever know what being dirt poor was. The Dean couldn’t give me a boarding room on campus, but they let me in through the back door crack of their elite hood and that was good enough for me. I didn’t want to stay, I only wanted to visit.

  I caught two trains and a bus just to get to school every day. The tiny apartment I leased was a red brick walk up where we were packed in like sardines.

  Over time I managed to adapt to the range of eclectic sounds. On the regular you could hear everything because the walls were paper thin. Fighting and screaming in apartment A. Broken dishes smashing against the wall. I placed an anonymous call to the cops a time or two when it got too bad. If I stayed up late at night studying for tests I could barely rest because of the noise. That’s when I learned about the importance of coffee and why adults drank it so much.

  Mr. Duffy lived downstairs with a fluffy white poodle, he was a harmless old man, but his dog used to pee on the hallway mat leaving the place reeking of dog piss. Many of the residents complained and the superintendent of the building almost took the dog from Mr. Duffy.

  You gotta train your dog. It’s peeing everywhere. It’s disgusting! Residents are complaining.

  When the neighbors saw how down in the mouth he was without his furry companion they folded and let him keep it. So the people in my brownstone wa
lk-up became my little family and we all looked out for one another. Most of the time.

  My introverted nature kept me locked in my own world but I knew how to navigate life on the streets. You had to know in East Boston. Or ‘Eastie’, as it was affectionately known by the locals. Many immigrants resided in the area. Irish, Russians, Jews, and Italians being some of them. Not the best neighborhood, but not the worst. Just ask people who lived in Roxbury, and they would agree. Their suburb was the worst. Not a place you wanted to walk alone at night - male or female.

  The first thing I purchased when I moved to the apartment was pepper spray. Boston housed some of the most notorious mobster families and the historic city carried a violent energy that hummed beneath the surface. Not that I cared, I was too busy trying to survive my own jungle in life.

  Intense guilt engulfed me because I left Lacey, making nightmares reign supreme at times. I woke up in cold sweats that something bad happened to her. When I left, she didn’t beg. I remembered her small, freckled face as I clutched my packed bags at the door.

  “I know you have this fancy scholarship, and you gotta go. I’m fine here. I will be out soon too.” She couldn’t hide the tears from me in her lie as I hugged her. Lacey was the spitting image of our father and she was long legged with a freckled face, mousy brown hair, a button nose, and full cheeks.

  “I’ll be back for you Lacey. Believe me.”

  “I know you will, big sis. Knock ‘em dead. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Lace.”

  The only reason I got the apartment alone was because I knew she was in safe hands and because of the scholarship. Concentrating on my studies was making a way for us both. The last foster home ended up being the right one for us.

  A lot of kids from the shelters weren’t as lucky. Some of them became runaways or pimped out prostitutes abused by their carers or ravished by drug addiction. I know because I’d seen a few of the girls strung out on the streets straggling in the daylight looking worse for wear. Me; I was the one that found any nook to study in regardless of the surroundings. The train. The bus. The library. The stoop. The kids in primary school used to tease me for sitting at the head of the class.

  They threw spitballs at me which stuck in the strands of my long hair. Picking them out was irritating. I would frequent the bathroom and comb them out like clockwork. I used to cry in the corners of the toilet stalls when it happened. Tears would stream down my face, but it just made me study harder. Even as I cried in the mirror I would say,

  “You’re going to be somebody. This shit’s going to end. You got this, Chantelle.”

  You see, I was the one with big girl dreams stored deep in her heart. The one that would make it out of the hellish existence that overarched my life.

  Why should we suffer because of our parents?

  Hot Boston sun shone through my living room window as one of my neighbors screamed out of it. A normal everyday occurrence in East Boston.

  “Ah ya clown! You better have my money next week ya hear? Otherwise, you’re chopped liver! I’ll have Danny coming for your ass!” I chuckled as I slurped on my soup. Mrs. Ramone; a feisty short Italian lady from the upstairs apartments. Every now and then she would bring me spaghetti. She reminded me of Cruella de Vil with the white streak she rocked in the front of her hair.

  “Shuddup, you’re not gunna do nuthin.’ Danny my ass. That guy’s a bum.”

  “Don’t you talk about my Danny like that! After all he’s done for you and your family. Don’t make me send you the evil eye!”

  “Evil, sheville. Simmer down.”

  “Oh yeah? You wanna find out?” A bottle tumbled as I heard it land and peeked out my grooty window. Never a dull moment in my apartment block.

  I sighed as I looked at all the college brochures fanned out in front of me. Decisions. Decisions. Decisions. In my career planning class, I got told to create a vision board. Every day I stared at it and reminded myself of what I was aiming for in life. To me they were more like a backup if the further away ones fell through. The ones I really wanted were on the Californian coast. I was a little I’d taken a year off to save and work with Mr. Leung. Another reason I was his favorite worker. To stay in Boston would remind me of all the pain we’d endured.

  My parents. They didn’t care about us and I wasn’t keen on playing the victim but being a parent before I was a child was fucked up. Jim and Roberta Simkins. My grandparents rubbed off on them and were raised in the Woodstock era, the time of civil unrest and anarchy from what they told me. It was fun to be a hippy back then, it was the era of experimental and colorful drug use. My parents' two drugs of choice were funny-looking mushrooms and marijuana. One time I saw Lacey pick one of the mushrooms up in her fat little fingers and slapped it out of her hands. She was only three years old at the time.

  My parents who were both laid up on our tattered mustard colored couch laughed like hyenas. They thought it funny that their three year old might get high off mushrooms.

  “Isn’t that cute, Jim. A daughter after my own heart.” Cackling laughter burned my ears that day, and I would never forget what I heard.

  I remembered glaring at them. “You can’t feed her those! They’re not normal mushrooms. I know they’re not!”

  “Oh, get off your high horse Channy! They won’t hurt her,” my mother’s damaging voice rang out as I tried to talk to them, but they were too high and waving their arms around.

  “C’mon Lacey, put that down and let’s go play outside.”

  I was proud to have made it to nineteen. My mind shifted back to the memory of the strong pungent fumes as my parents and co. passed bongs around the room. At the time, I didn’t know what a bong was. All I knew is they were sucking in some water from a pipe and handing it around a group of people to try. From sunup to sundown, they did it. The stench hung in the air like a filthy, dirty cloud. Took days for the smell to leave the house. The odor would seep into my clothing, and kids at school would laugh. They nicknamed me the “weed girl.” I had no idea at the time what they meant. All I knew is they were ridiculing me, and that wasn’t a good sign. Kids can be cruel. The level of shame I felt back then was a feeling I vowed never to experience again.

  Strangers of all kinds used to float in and out of our house. We never knew who was coming and who was leaving. Our place was a free-for-all. Men with long matted dreads that smelled like ass and hadn’t showered for days were welcome. Women were there too, ones who wore flowery dresses, with colorful wreaths in their hair and tufts of hair sprouting from their armpits.

  All night parties raged with strange moaning as the lights went down and clothes were strewn all over the living room. Wasn’t until I was older that I understood what those moans were. I never ever let Lacey out into the living room. Never, ever. I used to put the pillow over my head, so I could block out the noise and turn up the little radio we’d been given in our room. I swear my parents rarely slept and neither did the people who came and went from the toxic space.

  Used to scare the shit out of me. I always made sure me and Lacey were in our rooms or out playing when random people came over. If it was nighttime, I would lodge a chair in front of our door. I did that after one of my father’s drunk friends thought our bedroom was the toilet. I shuddered when I remembered the pervert trying to get in. The door jangled and trembled as I pulled the covers up to my neck. He managed to burst in, he was so high he didn’t know what he was doing. He dropped his pants and pulled his danger dagger out. I covered Lacey’s eyes as she huddled up in the bed away in the corner.

  “Ohhh, I thought this was the toilet. Sorry Channy. Where is it?” This guy with straggly hair smelled uber bad and was waving his wand around our bedroom floor. The only reason he stopped is because both Lacey and I started screaming at the top of our lungs.

  Everybody called me ‘Channy’ back then including my parents. I asked Lacey to stop calling me that as I got older, I wanted no reference to that name. I wanted it dead and buried. Peri
od. That nickname would not see the light of day.

  “Nooo! This is our room! The toilet is next door,” I yelled as I shielded my sister who was shivering in the corner.

  “Alright kid. Calm down. You’re ruining my buzz, ya.” Lacey, with her beautiful blonde hair, tucked into my bed that night.

  “I wanna leave here Channy. I don’t like these people.” I kissed her on the head and hugged her.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you always. I won’t let anything happen to you. We’re going to leave as soon as I can get us out of here.”

  “Love you, Channy.”

  “Love you too, Lace. Go to sleep now.” I used to tiptoe in the morning over the drunken and passed out bodies of our living room floor. Sometimes we didn’t have breakfast to eat. All I saw in the fridge were bottles of beer and wine. Stale, lifeless pizza in a box. One or two slices - I would heat it up for Lacey and I and that would be our morning meal.

  We knew a hard knock life and sometimes I saw kids with their parents, riding their bikes and having fun with their perfect families. I could see the light in their eyes for their children. That glow wasn’t reserved for us in our house. We got the dregs of love. They only showed that when they were high. On the come down they wanted us gone. We became the ugliest things on the planet to them. We were bubblegum that stuck to their shoes that they accidentally found themselves in. That’s when I realized the life, we grew up in was dysfunctional and there was nothing I could do about it.