Around 1996 I used to take the bus with Denny once a week, boarding behind him at Eastern and Ponca, below Bay View Hospital, where he would go for his physical therapy. He stammered a lot, drooled a little, and was fairly pleasant, not complaining about his plight, not demanding help, although I tried to make sure he didn’t flip over into the gutter in his powered wheelchair.

Denny owed his dealer, Rich, money, and was simply trying to avoid him until he actually got some money when he slid into Tom’s Bar on the corner of Eastern Avenue early one Saturday morning. Rich, a red-headed guy with a bad complexion, walked into the front almost as soon as Denny took a seat to buy a beer with[ presumably] the money he did not have to pay Rich for the three rocks of crack he was supposed to have sold, but had smoked instead. Denny, a small thin guy, “ran like hell, man!”

He ran east, down the side street, toward the current site of the Samos Restaurant. He could not think of where to go, had not worked out an escape plan. This was back in the days before the massive Latino influx, when Greektown was Greek. As Denny ran from Rich, who was walking, he saw two guys walking up the street with jackets draped over bats at their side. It was July. Denny “freaked and darted” to his right, and ended up in the “dead-end street-alley” down behind the row houses. These were Rich’s guys.

They, all three, cornered Denny against a wall. The two men beat him from the knees up, pretty much keeping below the strike zone. When his knees went and he slid down the wall they began cracking his elbows and ribs. When he slid lower into a fetal position they went for the head and shoulders. He was left shaking and unconscious, and, at the time of our brief discussion, had been shaking ever since. Eventually he crawled out and up to Ponca where a man coming out of his house saw him and called an ambulance.

At the time of the interview he was confined to a wheelchair due to skeletal and neurological damage, and was attempting to regain the use of his body through physical therapy. His right hand was not nearly as bad off as the palsied left.