Cops Shows--Life Imitating Art or Vice Versa or What's In A Name?

I'm one of those people who's convinced that if you really like great fiction stories look no further than real life.

Although I'm enjoying the new Fox TV show "Chicago Code" I find that it's probably a really difficult task for their very talented staff of writers to conjure up fantastic stories each week that must first be dramatic (or melodramatic as the case may be) and more importantly entertain the masses.

But as much as I want to like the show and its almost life-like Chicago characters (Jarek Wysocki is the name of the leading character on the show, only one consonant off from the Wylocki family I knew growing up with on the southeast side of Chicago), I find the other characters and their names a bit of a stretch. His partner has a first name of Caleb. Nobody in Chicago I ever knew had the first name of Caleb. (Then again, I guess one could make an argument that my first name, Pascal, is just as odd.)

Whenever I talk to people here in Arizona, where I've lived for the last sixteen plus years, I mention in stories I tell about my days growing up in Chicago some of the names of the guys I grew up with. My AZ listeners shake their heads and smile, many times commenting how "Chicago" they sound.  Strong, tough, ethnic names like Lou Bufano, Ivano Menconi, Johnny Montalbano, Randy Zawis, Jimmy Stablein, and George Rydberg, to name but just a very few.  They wonder if I'm reading off the list of some possible cast names for a Chicago version of The Sopranos.

And it wasn't just the guys. The girls had just as strong and colorful names like Wartak, Sniegocki, Gaskor, Slattery, and Caputo.

But this was all normal.  And the stories of growing up there seemed normal too. I had a friend named Johnny Goshen. He and his family of about twelve people (I never knew exactly how many brothers and sisters he had) lived upstairs of his aunt's tavern called "Wilma's Tap." John took me and Ivano into the basement of the tavern one day where all the beer and liquor was stored, definitely an area off limits to the three high school freshman.

I was in awe.  I had never seen so much booze in all my life. Boxes of liquor were stacked so high in the room that they blocked almost all the light coming in from the two, small basement windows that barely lit the dank room that smelled of stale beer. (Later, this experience helped me write a scene in my novel, Id entity: Lost , where my hero, Stan Kobe, was being held hostage in a liquor storage room underneath a southside Chicago bar and restaurant.)

Johhny offered me and Ivano beer, of course, and we gladly indulged, chugging as mch beer as we could in the few brief minutes our host thought were safe to stay down there.  The dilemma came when we wondered what to do with the empty beer cans. Johnny told us not to worry and showed us his secret of how to dispose of them. He pointed to a three-inch diameter hole in the low-hanging Masonite ceiling and proceeded to shove the beer cans up through the hole.

I was mesmerized and asked Johnny how many cans he thought were up there. He shrugged and gave me that devilish smile that made him such a likable friend and proceed to thump the ceiling with his fist.  It sounded as if a hundred beer cans rattled above our heads.  I laughed, feeling the high of the hops, a result of drinking my beer in two minutes. We then got out of there before his Aunt Wilma discovered our mischievous ways (as if she didn't know already).

These are the types of stories that need to be worked into shows about Chicago. Just one of thousands that are probably so common to my fellow southeast siders yet so outrageous to outsiders. 

So how about a scene in an episode of Chicago Code where Cubs fan Caleb has to a drink shot of Amaretto each time a Chicago White Sox player gets a hit against his hapless Cubbies during a Crosstown Classic game? Caleb would become shitfaced within three innings. Now that would make a good Chicago cop TV show great.