Comfort Food -- Mike

a/n: you have to look pretty hard to find the comfort food in this... although it is there. This ended up being more about something that makes Mike UNcomfortable. I like that, though. Not sure who to do next. Suggestions...???

Mike was sitting at his favorite neighborhood bar, Peter J's, sipping his Irish whiskey, and watching the people around him. He had learned at an early age to watch others, alert for what they might do to him. Over his twenty-five years as a cop, he had honed that particular skill to a razor sharpness. It was often said of Mike Logan that he could always spot the criminal in the room. In truth, he could always spot a lot more than just the crooks. Even on this particular Tuesday night, without even trying, he had spotted the couple in the front window breaking up... and the couple in the back corner hooking up. There were a couple of brothers at the end of the bar arguing over a racing form, and some NYU students standing around the pool table betting on whether one of the girls could beat her male opponent. He watched the bartender water the college kids drinks, and the waitress flash her cleavage at the brothers trying to increase her tip. He sat and thought about his hot-tempered temporary partner going home to her husband and her kids while he sat alone in a bar sipping whiskey and eating peanuts.

He ordered another drink and slipped off the stool for a quick visit to the men's room. When he got back, a well dressed, but very drunk young woman was now sitting on the stool that had been his for most of the evening. With a wink and a smile he leaned past her to grab his whiskey. As he reached around her again to grab the peanut bowl the waitress set a couple of gin and tonics down in front of the young woman. As she turned to go back to her friend, she crashed right into Mike dousing him with her drinks. Many apologies and a couple of bar towels later, he called it a night. The young woman, Cheryl, had insisted on giving him her phone number, which she had written on a napkin and which disintegrated into a soggy pulp in his pocket as he walked home, chased by the scent of the gin that had soaked his suit.

As he was climbing the stairs to his apartment he passed the stock analyst who lived on three, who got a whiff of all the gin and clapped him on the shoulder with a hearty, "that must have been some party, buddy!"

Inside his apartment he made bee line for his bedroom where he peeled off his wet clothes, and tossed them in the basket in the corner. He made a mental note to stop by the Chinese laundry in the morning and drop off his suit. He had a pile of shirts ready to go in anyway. He headed to his dresser to get a clean t-shirt, and as he sat on his bed and pulled his gin soaked t-shirt over his head the smell sent his memory racing back to a day some forty years earlier.

That long ago day when he learned to hate the taste and smell of gin.

Twelve-year-old Mikey had come home from school slamming the front door of the apartment behind him, and dropping his books on the living room rug. He got himself a glass of milk and a handful of cookies, and plopped down by his schoolbooks to do his homework and watch TV. He finished his schoolwork, and when the six o'clock news came on he turned off the TV and headed into his bedroom. Off and on over the past couple of hours he'd paused to wonder where his mother was, but he had quickly decided he didn't really care. He had learned a long time ago that he was better off when she wasn't home. And in the eighteen months since his Dad had died, things had gotten progressively worse. He grabbed a couple comic books and lay face down on his bed reading them until the light outside his window faded, and he could no longer see. He sat up and pulled the chain over his bed that turned on his ceiling light, and then rolled over and dug his baseball mitt and a baseball out from under his bed. He lay back on his bed, tossing the baseball up in the air and catching it in his mitt, and gazing at the Yankees pennant taped to the wall at the foot of his bed.

His dad had bought him that pennant two years ago on when they had gone to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. It was, Mikey thought, probably the best day of his whole life. Hand in hand, father and son had taken the Number 4 train uptown. Hand in hand they had walked into the newly renovated stadium, and once inside they sat in the bright, shiny, new blue seats and looked out over the green grass underneath the cloudless Spring sky.

Forty years later Mike sometimes allowed himself to hope that, if there is a heaven, that it looks a little like Yankee Stadium looked on that sunny Saturday afternoon.

Father and son did all the things that fathers and sons do at a baseball games. They cheered on their team, yelled at the umpires, and tried to tell themselves it didn't matter that their team didn't win. They ate hot dogs, and had bags of peanuts thrown at them. They drank ice cold sodas during the seventh inning stretch, and then went home tired but very happy. Mike clutched his pennant and his other souvenirs tightly the whole way home. The program, the ticket stubs, and even the empty peanut bag were kept in a shoe box under his bed, along with an assortment of well worn baseball cards.

He was in the kitchen making himself a bologna sandwich when he heard the buzzer. It rang with the triple ring his mother always used when she forgot her key, which was almost always. He buzzed her in and was picking up his schoolbooks from the carpet when he heard her banging on the door and yelling, "Michael, get out here and help me, these bags weigh a ton!"

He opened the door, grumbling, "Why do you always forget your keys?"

"Someone always lets me in," she blithely answered him as she headed for the kitchen carrying two sacks of groceries. "Now put those books away and come clean up this mess you made in here so I can put these groceries away! There are crumbs everywhere."

"I was just making myself a sandwich."

"I don't want excuses from you, just do what I tell you. Why do you always make things so difficult?"

Mikey wanted to say that he thought she was the one who made things difficult, but he'd had enough whippings to convince himself that some things were better left unsaid. As he finished making his sandwich, he watched his mother dig a couple of bottles out of one of the grocery bags and make herself a pitcher of martinis. She poured herself a drink, added a couple of olives and went off into the living room to watch TV. He cleaned up his dishes, put away the groceries, and was about to sit down at the table to eat his sandwich. He went to the refrigerator to get the bottle of milk. The milk was behind the pitcher of martinis. Mike gingerly set the glass pitcher on the counter beside the fridge and with the milk bottle in one hand, reached up into the cupboard to get a glass for his milk. As he was turning, his sleeve caught on the glass stirrer sitting in the martini pitcher knocking it over. It smashed on the edge of the counter, splashing him in the face, and causing him to drop the milk bottle, which shattered at it hit the floor. Mikey looked around in horror at the mess that was rapidly spreading across the kitchen floor. He grabbed a tea towel and as he knelt down trying to mop up some of the liquid he sliced his knees open on the many pieces of glass that littered the floor. Red blood joined the curdling puddle of gin and milk.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what the Hell is going on in there?!" he heard from the living room.

Tears streaming down his face, he tried to wipe them away as he called out, "I'm sorry, Mom, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do it, it just ..."

"Christ Almighty, Michael, what did you do?" His mother stood in the doorway looking down at him.

"I was just trying to get a glass of milk, and my sleeve caught on the pitcher, and I dropped the milk and..."

"Waste, waste, waste. Do you think money grows on trees? Do you? I go out every day to earn the money to buy you that milk, and how do you repay me?All I want to do at the end of a long day is relax and what do you do? You wreck everything." She grabbed him by the arm and shoved him into a kitchen chair. She grabbed the nearly empty bottle of gin off the counter and unscrewed the top. "Since you like gin so much, it's a good thing I've got some handy. Nothing like alcohol to prevent infections." With that she dumped the rest of the bottle over his cut and bleeding knees.

"Mom, please, please don't..." he cried, flinching as the stinging alcohol soaked his shorts and mixed with the blood running down his legs. His socks turned pink from the blood.

"Get the hell into the bathroom and clean yourself up. I'm going out, since I can't even relax and have a drink in peace in my own home. You can clean up this mess you made in here.

Mikey changed his clothes and stuck some band-aids on his knees, and cleaned up the visible mess in the kitchen as best he could. For weeks after the incident the apartment reeked of spoiled milk. He couldn't clean up the milk that had run under the refrigerator, and some of the milk had dripped down into the heating grate, spreading the smell throughout the apartment, and even into the neighbor's apartments. The day the super came to complain to his mother about the smell he got another whipping from his Mother. She had kept one of his father's old belts in her closet and through the years Mike came to know that belt well. He never forgot. Anger, shame, and humiliation were always remembered, and they always smelled like gin to him.

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a/n: This has taken me a couple of weeks to craft... I write REALLY slowly...and it kept wanting to get longer and longer. And I know almost nothing about Mike's childhood... and less than nothing about baseball. Isn't an imagination a great thing?!