Unus the Untouchable

            On Sunday I spent a lot of the day trying to get caught up on my journal but I was still behind when the day was done.

            I had a cheese, avocado, tomato and cucumber sandwich for lunch with some cranberry cocktail.

            I did exercises in the afternoon and took a bike ride.

            When I came back my next-door neighbour Benji was on the way out. He hardly ever leaves the block that our building is on and when he does it’s usually to go to the next block west. In the 21 years he’s lived at this address I’ve never run into him at any of the three supermarkets in the area. That’s because he only shops at the little West Indian places and lives on take-out. He came from Guyana in the 70s and if you talk with him long enough he’ll start ranting about how his generation of immigrants were responsible while the current wave just comes to live on welfare and to get drunk on the street. His only experience of newer immigrants is of the few he sees around the donut shop. He doesn't see the ones that have been just as hard working as he was.

            I had an egg with toast and a beer for dinner. But then I felt I needed something more to go with the beer and I had some corn crackers with cheese. That was a mistake because then I felt like I’d overeaten.

            I watched an episode of The Untouchables. The name often reminds me of the X-Men villain Unus the Untouchable, who was in the early X-Men comics that I had when I was a kid. Unus’s power was a force field that made him untouchable.

            In this Untouchables story a mob boss named Viale is trying to bring slot machines into Chicago, which isn’t against the law and so it seems odd that the feds are trying to stop him. The idea is that the mob makes money from one-armed bandits to finance criminal activities. A former mobster and former Irish Republican soldier named Frank O’Dean is just getting out of prison and Viale wants him to help run his slot machine sales operations. O'Dean is a tough guy but he wants to go straight. His one weakness is that he has a daughter that he had arranged to be raised properly without knowing her father was ever a gangster. In fact she was told that her father died in WWI as a hero. Viale threatens to reveal to her the fact that her father was alive all this time and has been both a gangster and a convict.  He makes this threat at a high-class party that he is holding as his daughter Eleanor is there with her fiancé. He hasn’t seen her since she was a baby. O’Dean agrees to work for Viale and then approaches her and tells her that this is not the kind of party she should be attending. She doesn’t recognize him but when he speaks to her she trusts that what he is saying is true and she tells her fiancé she wants to leave.

            O’Dean runs Viale’s slot machine racket for him and it’s a big success. But when Eliot Ness begins to make a dent in the operation Viale tells O’Dean to rub Ness out. O’Dean refuses but then Viale threatens him again with exposure to his daughter. O’Dean goes to Ness and points his gun at him but he can’t go through with it. O’Dean is now a marked man. Later a car drives by as he leaves his home and opens fire with a machine gun. He is badly wounded and there’s a 50-50 chance of him pulling through but he’s learned that his daughter is getting married in the morning. Still bleeding, he sneaks out of the hospital. The first thing is does is go to Viale and kills him. Barely able to stand, O’Dean makes his way to Ness’s home and offers to give him Viale’s entire mob if he will drive him across town. O’Dean sees his daughter get married and outside the church he is standing with Ness as she leaves with her husband. He tells her “Good luck!” as she passes. She says, “Aren’t you the gentleman who …” but he says, “No, you don’t know me, but good luck anyway!” She thanks him and leaves and then O’Dean collapses. One assumes he has died.
            It seems a bit fucked up that they would deliberately write a story about a good mobster and make him an Irishman against the Italians. It implies that the Irish are inherently more moral.