Shattered Sense of Innocence by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

13

Born into Misery

THE STENCH INSIDE THAT SMALL, arid room was unbearable. The blond-haired boy, Roger Spry, picked up dog excrement and disposed of it and arranged himself on the dirty, flea-bitten mattress that passed for a bed. Above him was a small window. Spry often slept sitting up with his face turned towards the tiny opening so he could breathe clean air. Roger passed the night sleeping on the “ground floor” of Kenny Hansen’s dog kennel at the Bro-Ken H.1 The boy loved animals. Next to Beverly Rae Hansen, the pretty lady living in the house, animals were about the only creatures in this world that had shown him affection of any kind. Spry sat on his mattress thinking about his crummy life and wondering when Mr. Hansen would be kind enough to let him come inside his home again. As bad as it was, this new arrangement was better than the life he had known with his alcoholic father and prostitute mother.

Born into a world few people could imagine, Roger Spry lived the first ten years of his life in a small West Virginia coal-mining town. When the mines closed down in 1959, his father traveled to Illinois in search of employment. After six months had passed, he sent word back to his wife to pack up the car, Roger, and the six other kids and join him in Calumet City, near the South Works steel mill.

The vice district of Cal City was a savage and lawless strip festering along the ragged edge of the Indiana-Illinois state line. Since the earliest years of the twentieth century, the town had been under the thumb of one rackets boss or another. Gambling, prostitution, and other adult entertainments ran wide open. Stag films were peddled in the back alleys and doorways of the town back in the days when pornography was commonly known as “smut,” and possession of the same carried stiff fines and prison sentences. At the Penny Arcade at 114 State, a large, secret room in the back accommodated up to thirty patrons who paid $10 a piece to view a four-hundred-foot-long stag film. The local politicians were up to their eyeballs in graft and on the dole of organized crime. They were powerless to prevent any of the illicit goings-on. Conditions had remained much the same from the horse-and-buggy days up until the early 1990s when commercial redevelopment and changing societal tastes rendered the last of the gaudy sin-and-sleaze palaces obsolete.

Young and good-looking, Roger’s mom went to work as a stripper after her husband, a chronic complainer, alcoholic, and general loser, proved incapable of caring for his sons as he drank himself into oblivion. The gambling dens, peep shows, and sex clubs lining Strip Row opened for business in the early-evening hours and remained open until six the following morning. In this Dickensian half-world, this mere wisp of a boy was compelled to sit quietly on the barstools inside the dives while his prostitute mother sold herself to the barflies and johns who worked in the steel mills nearby.

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