Chapter XIX: Simeon Grasso's Biggest Mistake

Simeon Grasso—the younger brother of our former vindictive landlord Nolan—pronounced his name like a bastardized version of Simon, wore designer glasses that magnified his eyeballs to gargantuan proportions, and had neither the physical prowess nor draconian attitude that made his brother such a cruel monster. Simeon acted tough, but I think he took himself way too seriously. Simeon reminded me of the person I used to be on the outside: a faithless follower who had never had any real responsibility and abandoned his responsibilities as soon as things got out of hand.

Papa Grasso had purposely put Simeon’s brother Nolan in charge of beating money out of the residents of the abandoned college because he knew that his youngest son was incapable of handling a task as simple as a shakedown. Simeon was not tough, but he was a great actor. He could mimic toughness from TV bad guys, and when he started following Nolan around campus, Simeon would often repeat Nolan’s ominous threats as if he were trying to upstage his big brother. It was a defense mechanism, of course. Simeon’s bark was bigger than his bite, and whenever he barked himself up the wrong tree, he could always count on his father and brother to come to his rescue.

The Grassos had made most of their money in real estate before the ill-fated Morgenthau deal. After that they only seemed to lose money. Papa Grasso owned everything from residential properties and factories to department stores and office buildings. When Simeon flunked out of college and came home with the intention of learning the family business, he was disappointed when his father said no. As far as Papa Grasso was concerned, the business would die with him. To keep Simeon from sitting on his ass in the family’s living room all day long, his father assigned him to be the general manager of a nightclub that he had acquired in a real estate deal.

Simeon was hungry for a chance to prove to his father that he could be useful to the company. In his defense, as soon as Simeon started running the Kobra Klub, business boomed. Long before Simeon owned the club—when I was still a high school reject—the Kobra Klub’s bouncers were among the strictest in the Tri-Towns. It didn’t matter much to my friends. There were always places where underage kids could drink, and the beer was usually cheaper.

Simeon was only 21 years old when his father gave him the rights to manage the Kobra Klub, and he packed the place to the gills every weekend by loading the guest list with his underage friends from high school and college. Any bouncer who denied entry to one of Simeon’s friends was quickly dismissed or publicly berated in front throngs of sexy young women in slinky black dresses.

Like me, Simeon had grown up in the wealthy suburban underbelly of the Tri-Towns and like me; his friends had been born into well-to-do families with plenty of money in the bank. The combination of easy access to booze, a thick bankroll and Simeon’s apathetic, anything-goes attitude turned the Kobra Klub into one of the hottest nightspots in town.

On a Saturday night at the Kobra Klub, only half of the patrons were of legal drinking age. Of course, the only way one could figure this out was to listen to banter in the ladies’ room about who the homecoming queen was sleeping with. The nightclub had a dozen private rooms and nooks where the only rules Simeon enforced were that the tab was paid in full and that the waitresses were tipped handsomely. Simeon made sure that his high rollers were taken care of. Any drug could be made available for the right price, bottles of the world’s most expensive champagne flowed like tap water and attractive young women who argued with the bouncer over the validity of their identification could easily get Simeon to admit them by presenting convincing oral arguments behind closed doors on the couch in his office.

That’s how Simeon had first met Eva, the blond bombshell that wasn’t even through her first year of high school by the time she started sneaking into the Kobra Klub.

The Grassos had lined enough pockets to keep Simeon out of trouble, but he continued to abuse that privilege. It was one thing to get Papa Grasso’s friends in the police department to look the other way when underage kids were caught drinking in Simeon’s club, but it was a completely different story when rival drug dealers were firing shots outside the club after an argument.

The real black eye was Eva. Simeon had met Eva while talking to friends outside the club on a chilly winter’s evening. As he conversed with his bouncers and double-checked his hand-written guest list, he felt a slender woman graze his left side. He turned to find Eva, who was perhaps the most gorgeous thing he had ever laid eyes upon. At the time, Eva was not yet drowning in her addictions and her face had not accumulated a multi-colored collage of bruises and abrasions. She was still the young girl who had won every beauty pageant that she had ever been in. She didn’t have an ounce of baby fat on her; she was 100% pure sexual muscle and she exuded a seductive confidence that was disarming even to Simeon’s tough-guy persona.

In a voice that was as innocent as the girl next-door; yet as dirty as a veteran call girl, Eva told Simeon that she knew that she was not on the guest list, but surely there had to be some way that she could get on the list. Simeon could have asked her for some ID to see that she was at least of legal consenting age to discuss the possibility of her entering his club, but Simeon had never been in a position to be this close to a fox like Eva. Opportunities like this were once-in-a-lifetime. He let her in without question. Thus began the cataclysmic tryst of Simeon and Eva.

At the time, Eva was perfect for Simeon. Not only did she legitimately find him attractive, but the girl was a spectacular attraction herself. After their initial meeting and rendezvous behind closed doors in Simeon’s office, Eva became a regular at the Kobra Klub on Friday and Saturday nights. Eva didn’t need to show ID when she approached the bouncers. Her face was as good as any legal document. She had been turning heads since before puberty, and she turned heads up and down the queue. She never had to wait in line; she just walked up to the bouncers and threw them little kisses as they lifted the velvet rope for her.

Simeon usually walked around the club with a few women on each arm, and Eva was always one of them. She could drink like an Irish longshoreman and her gorgeous little nose sucked up blow like a Texas tornado. At a certain point in the night Eva would hop up on the bar and start dancing to the thumbing bass and drums provided by the hottest DJs in the Tri-Towns. Her antics not only drew raucous cheers from the gaggle of meatheads that clamored for the young girl to show them her tits, but it got other girls to hop up on the bar and dance as well. The more the girls got wild, the more drinks the guys purchased for them. By the time the bartenders clanged on the bell for last call, the club was still pretty packed. The money was rolling right in.

At first, Eva was an attraction for everyone at the Kobra Klub to salivate over. It was all she ever wanted. Eva was starved for attention, and she was getting more attention that she had ever dreamt of while she danced in a drunken, cocaine-induced haze on the bar in Simeon’s club. After months and months of over-indulgence, Eva’s star began to fall, and once it picked up some steam, it came crashing down like a meteorite.

It started with little things like getting into catfights with other girls who were hanging around Simeon. Even though Eva had a couple of threesomes with Simeon and other women, she got very jealous whenever certain girls would throw themselves at him. She was known to throw a wild slap across the face of an unsuspecting hoochie, just so she would know who was boss. This created unnecessary tension in the club, and it was embarrassing for Simeon to have to explain to his customers who the unruly teenage bitch was. Eva was also known to pull ridiculous stunts including chugging $1,000 bottles of campaign like a beer bong at a frat party, flashing her bare chest at older patrons and offering to give head to anyone who could score her some speed.

It all unraveled during a bash one April night when Eva did way too much cocaine and passed out in the middle of the dance floor. Simeon was fucked. He and a friend sneaked Eva out a back door and took her to the local hospital, put her in a wheelchair and left her outside the emergency room. He knew that she was underage and that he could go to jail for letting her into his club and allowing her to do the drugs that she had done. Of course, he still assumed that Eva was around 18 or 19. There was no way he could have known that the queen of the Kobra Klub was only 16 years old.

To make matters worse Simeon returned home after that very long night at the club and hospital to find his brother Nolan—who had been missing for close to a week—stark naked, covered in grease and human waste, shivering from the cold, and so completely terrified by the ordeal that it would be months before he spoke a word to anybody.

Simeon had dodged a big bullet, but a smaller bullet had clipped him instead. A few concerned club-goers had called 911 when the girl passed out. He managed to escape with Eva, but the cops showed up anyway and wrote more than 100 tickets for underage drinking. The club was going to be closed down due to the massive amount of fines levied against it, as well as the fact that Simeon had made a ton of money and hadn’t reported a cent of it to the IRS. But it wasn’t so bad. He had lost his job at the club but found a new one when somebody had to fill his brother’s shoes over at Morgenthau.

As the summer wore on Eva pursued Simeon relentlessly after she had been kicked out of her parent’s house. She was desperate for his affection and he was the only one who could give her shelter and spare her from living with heathens down in the Tri-Towns. He would sleep with her from time to time, but he was becoming increasingly unhappy with her neediness, and a lot of these encounters usually ended with him threatening her with physical abuse. That summer, Simeon lost it when she asked him if she could move in with his family. The argument escalated and Simeon started hitting her. She started crying, and in an attempt to make him stop, she told him that she was pregnant. Simeon stopped, but became even more furious. She had known this for a couple of weeks. She didn’t tell him because she didn’t know where else to go or who to turn to. Somehow, this terrible man had become the only person that Eva could trust. She also revealed to him that she had lied to him about her age. She had just turned 17 years old. Within minutes, Simeon threw her in his car and proceeded to leave her in the Gardens at Morgenthau in the hope that she would disappear. Indeed, the Eva that Simeon had known did vanish. Without the drugs, without the violence, without the need for attention and sex, Eva had begun to see things clearly for the first time in many years. It was a sobering, heartbreaking realization, and it was necessary for her to move on.

She eventually found her protectors in people like The Steve, Willie and myself. Eva took a long time to get back on her feet, but when she did, we discovered that she was a good kid at heart and had been pulled in by the wrong crowd and allowed everything from social pressure to dissatisfaction with her perfectionist parents to corrupt her mind and send her into a fit of self-destruction.

When The Professor had died, Eva took it hard, even though she had known him for a very short time. She had only known him as a quiet old man who had been beaten so mercilessly that his voice barely rose above a whisper. Whenever she followed Grover up to his room to say hello, he always sent these condescending glares at Eva. The Professor hated the fact that so much wasted talent resided in the grime and hopelessness of Morgenthau, and it was obvious to me that it pained him to see something as beautiful as Eva wasting away here. Her presence no doubt added to the despair that drove him to take his own life.

When Grover and I told people about The Professor’s final exam, Eva took those words to heart. A lot of us had given up hope of ever escaping the abandoned campus and giving the real world another go, but the longer Eva stayed here, the more optimistic she seemed to get. The only thing that kept her from giving it another go in the outside world was Simeon.

Simeon did not know that we had taken Eva into our protective custody, and many efforts were made to make sure that she was not discovered when he came around looking for rent money. We hid her in closets and under old desks in the rooms of the residents who were always on time with their payments. But we knew that the day would come when she would be discovered.

On a Saturday morning in November, we woke up to find bright yellow notices on every door and window in every building on campus. Papa Grasso, Simeon and small group of contractors in blue hardhats had walked around campus since dawn placing these flyers on doors and talking ominously about which building was coming down first and where the new private communities would be constructed.

The notices read something like this:

EVICTION NOTICE: November 11. All buildings and structures on the Morgenthau University property must be evacuated by noon on November 11. Any persons found trespassing in these condemned structures will be arrested and charged with criminal trespassing. The police have been instructed to use K-9 dogs, electronic tasers and, if necessary, tear gas to remove any trespassers from these buildings. Please evacuate the premises immediately.

We had less than 24 hours until the only home some us had for over five years was to be destroyed. None of us had anywhere to go or anyone to stay with. If there had been hope, it was almost completely lost.

Simeon came marching along a half hour later as the cold November wind whipped through his leather jacket. He was walking with a conceited strut, as if he had been the one who had brokered this real estate deal, not his father. He was certainly thrilled to finally be ridding himself of the only responsibility he had, even if he was way more irresponsible than his brother.

He walked into the lobby of the Main Residence Hall and began shouting announcements that echoed the sentiments of the bright yellow flyers we had been reading all morning.

“Attention dirtbags!” he yelled from the lobby. His words echoed through the empty building and carried down the hallways. With our hearts sunken and our breathing low, we could hear every word. Even the maniacs in the basement had temporarily suspended their tortured screaming long enough to let him speak.

“You have until noon tomorrow to vacate the premises,” he said walking up the staircase to the second floor. “Anyone who remains here after that time will be considered a criminal trespasser on private property. You will be arrested.”

Simeon was strolling down the hallway towards Eva’s room, where she was curled up her terrified little ball, guarded from the doorway by The Steve, who was hell-bent on protecting her.

“Now,” Simeon continued in the hallway, “Some of you have been evicted before and you kept coming back. After tomorrow, armed guards will patrol this property every day and every night. Anyone found trespassing on the property after tomorrow will be shot on sight. Consider this your warning. We will not hesitate to kill you.”

In Eva’s room, the poor young girl began to hyperventilate. The Steve took his concentration off the approaching footsteps of Simeon and looked over at the girl who had constricted herself into a tight ball of fear. Her rapid breaths were quickly turning into fearful panting yelps. She hadn’t been this close to Simeon in close to six months. By now, she was getting further along in her pregnancy, and it was beginning to show on her tiny, malnourished body.

In the hallway, Simeon passed by Eva’s room before turning around and heading back to the stairs, but a slight sound stopped him. The tense silence of his speech had been interrupted by faint whimpers coming from behind the door that had previously belonged to Kendra—one that Simeon assumed had remained empty.

Being that he was an asshole, Simeon kicked the door wide open to find The Steve guarding Eva on a mattress in the corner of the room. She let out a scream when he barged in. The Steve quickly jumped to his feet, ready to defend Eva against this unmannered rich boy.

Simeon was not expecting to see Eva there. He had assumed that the addicts, maniacs and other evil things that lived in the woods had gobbled her up. She still had the goods on him, and apparently, she was still carrying his baby.

“You fucking bitch,” Simeon said under his breath. He then repeated it at an audible volume. “You fucking bitch. You thought you could get away from me didn’t you? Didn’t you!”

As Simeon moved menacingly towards her, The Steve moved forward to block his path. Simeon scoffed at the defensive maneuver by The Steve, one of the few residents at Morgenthau who he thought he could beat in a fight.

“What do you want, you fucking gook? Get out of my way!” The Steve offered up no rebuttal and refused to move away from Eva. Simeon took a step towards Eva, but the Steve gave him a quick shove that pushed him back a few steps. Simeon easily caught his balance and gave him a little chuckle, before he threw a moderately powerful sucker-punch that connected squarely with The Steve’s already cracked eyeglasses. The impact shattered what was left of his specs and sent him tumbling to the ground in a hail broken glass, blood and saliva.

While The Steve was on the ground, Simeon then turned his attention to Eva. Seeing what he had just done to her protector, she made a futile attempt to crawl away on her hands and knees, but Simeon quickly picked her up off the ground and slammed her against the wall of her room. She started screaming for him to let her go, but Simeon started yelling a slew of obscenities in an ugly mess of dialogue that I couldn’t make out. As she frantically tried to shake him off of her, Simeon made use of his free hand and delivered a series of crisp, bloodcurdling slaps.

In the past, Eva’s initial instinct against Simeon’s attacks was to curl into a fetal position and play dead. Suddenly, as Simeon levied serious backhands across her face, her budding maternal instincts kicked in and she switched her internal mechanisms from flight to fight. As Simeon wound his arm up for another blow, Eva lunged her head forward and slammed her big forehead on Simeon’s jaw, loosening a few of his front teeth. Simeon was temporarily stunned, but moments after the head butt, it was obvious that Eva had taken the bigger brunt, and she immediately slouched back against the wall.

Simeon came back even harder, and in a clumsy exchange, Eva tried to push him away from the wall. I don’t think Simeon meant to do what he did next; it was a passionate, angry scuffle. Eva had grabbed his hands and was pushing him back when a careless Simeon gave Eva a quick, stern knee-jab straight into Eva’s midsection. For the poor girl who was going through a rough time at Morgenthau on top of her sub-par pre-natal care, it was a terrible blow.

Eva immediately let out a yelp as if she were a Thanksgiving Day balloon that had been popped. She fell backwards and slowly collapsed against the wall while letting out a long crescendo of a squeal. Simeon stood over her with a shit-eating grin. He had not meant to inflict such a savage blow, but regardless of intent, Simeon seemed to be pleased with the result.

He leaned over to give her one more punch to the temple, but he suddenly froze, as if someone playing the action on TV had hit pause. From behind him rose The Steve, who despite being cut up by his shattered glasses had just stuck Simeon in the back with his brother’s Jaeger switchblade. It was the same blade that Nolan had tried to use when the addicts in the woods abducted him more than six months prior. We had all feared that the addicts had killed The Steve, but he had gone out there to join them. He led the crusade against Nolan, and he had kept Nolan’s shiny blade all to himself, a trophy of their revenge.

Now, he had just stabbed Nolan’s younger brother in the back while he attempted to hit a helpless young girl who lay injured on the floor. The Steve quickly pulled out the blade from Simeon’s back, causing a stunned gasp to escape from his suddenly pale face.

“Close your eyes,” said The Steve to Eva with fearless determination. Eva did as she was told, but heard the knife dive deep into Simeon’s back thrice more before she felt the wretched son of a bitch fall to the floor with a hearty thud.

In the hours that followed, nobody seemed to be too worried about the fact that one of our fellow residents had just murdered the son of the rightful owner of the property we lived on. Nobody was worried that The Steve, or any of us would be sent to jail. Nobody was worried that we had less than 24 hours to pack up our few belongings and head out into the looming winter with no place to stay and no money to start a new life. The only thing we cared about was Eva.

Simeon had kneed her right in the stomach, and the attack had hit her in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was bleeding when Grover and The Steve carried her down to the latrine where she continued to cry inside the damp chamber. Outside, every resident in the building waited to hear any news.

Grover still knew a lot about anatomy, and he was able to diagnose Eva’s condition pretty quickly. With the same frank and somber tone that Dr. Salisbury had spoken to him seven years earlier, Grover had to break the news to Eva.

“Eva, honey,” said Grover with a sigh. “I’m so sorry. You’ve had a miscarriage. You’ve lost your baby.” She did not take the news well, and let out a scream so savage, it even put a little bit of fear into the maniacs one floor below.