He doesn't like to think of the time before, of the life he use to live, but some things he carries on with him, no matter how hard he tries to leave them behind.
There are few things more important to Spot then his cane, his slingshot and his necklace. The red spenders, maybe, or that choice seat in the restaurant, the one by the window his boys always leave empty just in case he joins them for a meal. But the cane, slingshot and necklace are what make him who he is.
The cane belonged to his father. A tall man with a ginger beard and booming laugh. He remembers clearly the way it looked in the man's hands, how powerful his father seemed with the golden tipped black wood at his side. It's a power he himself feels every time he picks it up. Its black paint has faded and the gilding is so worn it shows the lead underneath, but with it in his hands he knows he is more than a match for any who dare to face him. The cane, like the man who use to own it, stands true and bright in his mind.
His slingshot was a gift from a brother he barely remembers. When he fits it into his palm, his fingers working the pliable elastic, he can always see another pair of hands sliding it into place. "This is how ya do it," the ghost whispers, as he puts a broken marble into place. Spot still has that marble, the first one he ever shot, stuffed deep in the toe of his left boot. Safe in a section his foot never reaches.
As for the necklace, well the string itself is of no importance. It's the ring that it is slung through that matters. It's not something the thugs who breed in the underbelly of Brooklyn would covet. Just a bit of beaten tin with an imprint of a flower whose pale yellow paint has long since vanished. He can still see that ring glinting on the finger of a woman whose face he no longer recalls.
But her voice, crooning softly, haunts his dreams.
She sang to him, he remembers, as she lathered his hair with soap and poured scalding water over his back. He can picture the ridges in cracked rim of the tub where he use to line his fingers, stretching the middle one just enough that it hurt, as she washed away the dirt of the street.
He keeps these memories deep in his heart, separate from the endless drudgery of his daily life. Still, they are as much a part of him as his greasy brown hair and the half smirk he constantly wears. He sometimes wonders about the boy he would have been, the one who never had to make a go of it alone on the streets. What would he think, that boy with the name he doesn't remember having, if he ran into Spot Conlon on his way home to the man with the cane, the child with the slingshot and the woman with the battered old ring?