To the north we could breathe a little; the Burlington Northern Railroad merely separated us from Jewtown—“Maxwell Street” we called it—a crosshatch of sweaty jangling street market where drinking-age restrictions hadn’t caught on and goods-and-services warranties weren’t given or implied. Jewtown we “Puerto Ricans” could go to if we were careful, which being young we weren’t, until the riots changed the rules.
On Sundays, Muddy and Junior and Howlin’ Wolf and anybody you could name played Maxwell and Halsted. Black men sportin’ canary-yellow fedoras and girls on each arm mixed with nervous teenagers shopping for Mexican switchblades and factory-reject cowboy boots. Men with the musicians had walking sticks with voodoo heads and their women had nickel-plated revolvers. On the corner, Jim’s Original
grilled onions and Polish sausages all day. Nighttime white girls arched their backs under high-piled wigs, wore boots and tiny shorts and looked at you too long. The blues singers sang with half-a-man in each pocket, sipped those bottles between two fingers and each song till they were empty—song, bottle, and man.
Maxwell looked sort of like Eighteenth and Laflin does now, but acted way different. Fred Hampton of the Panthers was dead; so was Martin Luther King and the tension was high, but Sunday was a black/white truce day and Maxwell Street was the DMZ. Just before my big brother Ruben became a cop, he found me my first music-industry job sweeping the sidewalk out front of 831 West Maxwell at Maxwell Radio and Records—a real nice Jewish guy owned it, Bern Abrams and his wife, Idell-Idy. Ruben was their friend, made it a point that all the bad guys knew.
A week into my music career sweeping the sidewalk, Ruben walked out with three-hundred-pound Chicago legend Chester Arthur Burnett, the Howlin’ Wolf himself, harmonica in one world-class hand, guitar in the other. Howlin’ Wolf called me by name, took my broom, and slung his guitar over my shoulder. Un-freakin’-believable. Told me playin’ was better than sweepin’; that he’d done a truckload of both and knew whereof he spoke.
Howlin’ Wolf’s why I bought my first guitar. Okay, it was the girls, but Howlin’ Wolf was second. Big brother Ruben rode with me to a pawnshop in his friend’s squad car the very next day and put up half the money; told the steel-eyed man behind the counter I was good for the other half. And ever since a guitar’s been my answer to the day’s questions.
My guitar didn’t save Maxwell Street, long gone to “urban renewal,” and it hasn’t saved the blues from rap, although I’m trying. The Four Corners has hasn’t fared well, either. Out here I have to be
Officer
Vargas, but you can call me Bobby. Actually, if you’re a girl and like weekend guitar players, you can call me whatever you’d like. Toss in one of those pouty smiles or a three-star hair move, or just clap real loud while everyone else is talking, and I’m yours till you’re tired.
I’m not quite your rock-star moment? Well, this guitarist has done a demo/session-player audition at Wolfe City Recording Studio, ground zero for the blues after Chess Records closed. Granted Wolfe City hasn’t
called back yet, possibly because I stood in the outer office drooling on the framed, autographed eight-by-tens and album covers for an hour, trembling like it was first confession day at St. Dom’s. But Wolfe City will call, you’ll see. And then it’s “Stairway to Heaven” time. Get me the full pompadour, Ray-Ban 2140s, thin black tie—
baby
. Makes me shiver just thinking about it.
Unfortunately my district’s taxpayers, all the bangers, and most of my coworkers don’t see my future as clearly as I do; they think I’m just another pretty face. What I am is almost forty-two, the divorced father of two German shepherds—one of whom I miss—a failed Catholic, and speaker of street Spanish with some difficulty. My parents were both born in Mexico and my mom spoke lyrical Spanish every day of her life, so some in the Hispanic section of the Four Corners call my language issue a mental block. Others aren’t as kind.
Some in the neighborhood also say I have a problem with professionalism in certain situations. This might be true; I have received CR numbers (complaint registers) a hundred and sixteen times in nineteen years. Sounds like a lot, but it’s less than one a month and not bad if you beat them. If you don’t beat them, a hundred and sixteen would be a hundred and ten too many. Do I give a shit? Well, yeah, I enjoy beating the crap out of ghetto people.
Just kidding; we talk sort of tough down here. However, I do find some pleasure in trading punches with assholes, Hispanic gangsters in particular. Any gangster would do, but other than the Four Corners, the 12th District is almost exclusively Hispanic gangs, my homeys, many of whom I’ve known since they were shorties. They consider me a traitor; I have suggested they tighten up the hairnets and drive their ’62 Chevys south a thousand miles, learn to eat sand and iguanas, then come back and see which country they like better. I also insult black, white, and Asian gangsters, but not as well. A cultural bias? Only if you consider street gangs with twenty thousand members a culture.
SIREN. Then another. A blue-and-white wails past the alley’s mouth, a Crown Vic right behind him. A four-foot-tall tough guy backs away from the cars and into the alley’s mouth—flannel shirt, baggies, white sneakers. I pull my SIG Sauer, slide it under my leg, and pop my siren. The kid spins fast, almost falls, IDs the car, and digs in to run.
“
Little Paul
. Get your ass over here.”
Little Paul freezes, eyes cutting, trying to choose between whatever scared him into the alley or me, his seven-year-old brain not quite up to the task.
“Now.”
Little Paul unfreezes, pimp rolls to my front bumper, eyes me through the windshield, then cups his balls. He walks dented fender to my window where he stops and stands one shoulder lower than the other. The smooth brown face says,
“Me llamo Pachito.”
“Your name’s Paul. You’re an American, in America. You speak English.”
His head, even with the do-rag and flat-bill ball cap, barely makes the bottom of my window. But he be bad, baby. Squint-eyed, teeth bit together, don’t-fuck-with-me bad.
“Me llamo Pachito … Ramera.” Ramera
means
bitch
. As in, that’s what I am.
“All ganged up, huh? Your brother still dead? Your father? How’s that working out for them?”
Little Paul steps back and taps his chest with three fingers extended on both hands. KK—King Killers, street mythology that says his set kills Latin Kings on sight; doctrine that’s almost as stupid as the WTC-9/11-let’s-bomb-some-firemen ayatollahs.
“Your ma still working four jobs so you can wear those rags? Hang with these losers?”
“Mi madre—”
“Speak English, you little fuck, or I’ll throw your ass in those trash cans.”
He looks away—
fuck you
in street Spanish.
I pop the door, knock him off-balance, and exit, SIG 9 in hand. “Hands on the tire.”
He does. Seven years old, a second grader, and he knows how to be arrested. And social workers wonder why this gang shit pisses cops off.
“Gimme the rock or I make you strip.”
“TAC cops can’t do that. Gotta call Juvy.”
“I’ll call the Sisters of Providence, too. But that’ll be right after I fuck you in the ass. The rock or strip. One or the other. Now.”
He does neither. I rip the dope out of his pockets and the pocket liners with it. Fourteen bags that should’ve been in his mouth but his
mouth is too small. Ten dollars apiece. My left hand twists his shirt to his neck and spins him around to face me. My right hand holsters the SIG, then rubs black from my front tire. With my index finger I make a black dot on his forehead. Ash Wednesday for bangers.
“You tell Danny Vacco I catch you walking his dope again, I put a bullet in his head.” My index finger taps the dot. “Right. Fucking. There.”
“Don’ think so.”
“You don’t, huh? Why don’t we go find him now? I shoot the spic right in front of you. Make you boss.”
Little Paul looks away.
I shove him backward. “Why do I keep trying to be your friend? Maybe you’re just too stupid to save.”
He throws me the KK again.
“Get the fuck outta here. Tell big bad Danny I got his dope.” I draw my SIG and show Little Paul the barrel. “Right inside there is where I got it. And tell him Bobby Vargas don’t have to hide in his own neighborhood.”
Little Paul marshals his peewee-gangster dignity and slowly walks away to explain how he lost fourteen bags of rock. Later today I’ll make a pass on Jourdan Court so Danny Vacco knows it wasn’t bullshit. Even seven-year-olds don’t live long if they steal from the gang.
Back in the car I consider today’s
Herald
on the seat. The headline above the fold is Furukawa Industries and their billion-dollar support of Chicago’s Olympic rebid. We get the Olympics, money flows in from everywhere; Chicago’s budget is in the black for the next five years; developers make a ton of money; and a whole bunch of ghetto along the lakefront and ghetto gangsters are pushed out of the city.
Beneath the fold the news isn’t so good. Part one of an “exposé” written by Tracy Moens, Chicago’s star crime reporter. My name is prominent, as is Coleen Brennan’s, and so is the Four Corners’ troubled history
—special
problems like rape, cop killings, cop reprisals, and dead little girls. History that’s better for everyone if it stays buried with the victims and families … but won’t as long as there’s money to be made and old scores to be settled. And a big-city newspaper on life support.
I knew Coleen Brennan and her twin sister, Arleen—not to play
with; when I was a kid you didn’t play with the white girls, especially the Irish—but by the time we were six Coleen and I had become real friends just the same. The last time I saw Coleen she was in an alley between here and Greektown before Greektown was six-digit condos and coffee cost five dollars. They found her lying faceup, crumpled in the trash, a mitten on one hand, a torn school-uniform blouse, and nothing else. February had frozen her fast, the screams still in her eyes. At the time, and maybe still, it was the scariest, saddest thing I’d ever seen. She and I were thirteen. February 3rd, year of our Lord 1982.
Year of our Lord
—no way the God most people worship is real, not with the shit He allows. That said, I’ll grant the preachers and faith healers that something powerful is out here festering in the dark, whatever it is. If you’re a cop you can’t help but believe in evil—not after a career of gag-reflex basements, eighty-year-old rape victims, full-auto drive-bys … every now and then a Mulwray (from the movie
Chinatown
, our name for a father-daughter; some stuff you have to rename).
The 12th District cops caught Coleen’s killers and the state tried them—death sentence for the older one; triple life for the other because he only confessed to raping her. The killers were from Stateway Gardens, the projects by Thirty-fifth on the other side of the Dan Ryan, black teenagers who said they were in our neighborhood to see relatives who’d just moved in. It was the fearful era of white flight and the integration strategy of blockbusting and solid footholds. A week after the
Herald
printed the relatives’ part in the boys’ confession, the relatives’ apartment burned to the foundation. Took the Irish firemen an hour to get their hoses right. But the blacks kept coming and their gangs came with them.
Coleen’s twin sister, Arleen, stayed at St. Dom’s but no one outside the school ever saw her other than a uniform cop who’d walk her both ways and a Child Services worker (shrink) who visited twice a week. Coleen’s mom waitressed across the river in Bridgeport, tried to hold it together because she had Arleen to raise, but as it turned out Mrs. Brennan had only a year to live herself. After Coleen’s murder, the father became a neighborhood fixture even the non-Irish cops left alone, a mean hair-trigger longshoreman who drank on the Brennans’ stoop till the wife died and the surviving twin ran off a day later—fourteen
years old and she didn’t even stay for her mother’s funeral—says something about that household. The father eventually disappeared into Canaryville or some other private hell. I never set foot on Coleen’s block again. And prior to Coleen’s father leaving, no black people did, either.
Life went on in the Four Corners. Harold Washington out-campaigned Mayor Daley’s son and became the new mayor. Race and poverty and
new urbanism
dominated the city’s agenda, but back then the state of Illinois could still kill somebody for raping a little girl to death. Anton Dupree, the black teenager they executed, was thirty-seven when he finally died at Stateville; the other perp died in his cell—thirty-seven stab wounds to the neck, face, and chest. Anton talked a lot in the six months before the state killed him, pointed his finger everywhere except the mirror. By then I was on the job five years, got the chance to attend the execution in place of my commander, sat second row and smiled at Anton when they walked him in, but I don’t think he saw me—the state offers the condemned inmate tranquilizers ahead of time and Anton had accepted. Anton had a minister with him as well, a denomination-of-one preacher from Seventy-ninth Street who was sure this was a white conspiracy. The assistant state’s attorney sitting next to me said they should execute the preacher, too, call it efficient governance.
I was twenty-six on that very day and surprised that I didn’t feel any better when Anton died. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in capital punishment—sure, doing it quicker would make it more of a deterrent; and making state-paid DNA mandatory would level the field for the guys who can’t afford O.J.’s lawyers—but in the end, humans convicted of first-degree murder need to vacate the gene pool. And street cops can’t shoot them anymore.
So, why the
Chicago Herald
’s sudden interest in digging up the distant past? For one thing, it turns out Anton Dupree probably didn’t kill Coleen Brennan. I’m not saying Anton Dupree was an angel but it turns out he was retarded, “not operating with a clear understanding of his situation” when he gave and signed his confession. His public defenders say they didn’t know; the ASA who prosecuted him three times says she didn’t know; and I didn’t know … or don’t think I did.