The Old Neighborhood (12 page)

One night, someone busted out our first floor back window. The crashing glass triggered an instant nightmare in my sleeping mind. I screamed so loud that my parents were sure it was the second floor window that I slept under that'd broken. Sure that they'd find me, five-years-old with glass dug into my skin. But I was safe, and whoever'd broken the window was gone.

The next night, my Dad saw Gabriel on his way up our block like nothing'd happened, and he stomped towards him. Dad's hands always curled like he was crumbling wads of paper when he was getting ready to do something. Just as he was about to pass Gabriel, Dad suddenly dipped his weight downward. Then, he drove his wide, heavy fist up into Gabriel's jaw with all his might. Gabriel's molars crunched shut with a sharp crack. The force lifted Gabriel just off the ground. His feet levitated just off the ground. His neck stretched like he was hung from an invisible wire. Then, Gabriel descended. His body crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut. Gabriel's head cracked the sidewalk slab with a hollow pop. He lay flat and motionless on the sidewalk.

My father pulled out the .45 and kneeled down over Gabriel's body. He slid the length of the barrel into Gabriel's gaping mouth to wake him up. Then my father explained to him, in no uncertain terms, that he wouldn't be burglarizing homes in the neighborhood anymore. After that, Gabriel disappeared from the block, and the burglaries stopped—for a while anyway.

Ma hurried towards the front door. She dragged her thick, varicose-veined leg under her. Lil Pat rumbled down the stairs. As Ma got to the door, she closed it. She locked all three locks and the chain bolt, then pressed her back to the white-painted wood. I followed her. My betrayal of my brother and fear for my mother churned in my chest. He slowed as he neared the bottom steps and gripped the oak railing. All the family pictures hung just behind him on the staircase wall. They dated back to when Lil Pat was a chipped-tooth boy in the '70s. He hadn't gotten along with her even then.

He stared at her. His eyes widened, and the whites glistened behind the bulged, red veins. His movements were brittle, like taut cords ran through his entire body.

“Get out the way, Ma,” he warned.

“Patrick Charles,” she said, her voice thundering with fear and outrage. “What are you doing with your father's gun?”

He stepped down the last few steps to the landing.

“Get out the way,” he said, flatly, and tilted his head to the side.

“No, Pat. This has to stop,” she pleaded. Her body quivered.

“Get the fuck outta the way!” he yelled. “I'll blow your fuckin' brains out, BITCH!”

He twisted and pulled the .45 from his waistband. Then, he extended and pointed it directly in her face. It was like the bottom tip of my crucifix morphed into a point. It elongated, bent, and pierced my skin. Then, it sank deep into my heart and set like a hook. I clutched my chest. She bowed her head and looked away but didn't move from the door.

“Pat,” I said, breathless.  

Lil Pat turned and looked at me. The pistol trembled. All his teeth were showing—his face flexed.  I leaned my back against the wall in the hallway and slid down it slowly. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Confusion swept over his face.

“Naw, Joey, no,” He said, lowering the gun. “I wasn't gonna do it… I'm… I'm sorry.”

Then, he looked back at Ma. He dug his shoulder into her and knocked her out of the way. Then, he undid the locks as she grabbed at his wrist and hand. He swung the door open and smashed her into the wall with it. The rubber band snapped in her ponytail, and slices of her jet-black hair fell over her face. He thundered down the front steps and was gone.

She shut the door and locked it, taking heaving breaths. And that wasn't the last time there'd be a gun pointed at someone I loved.

•

A FEW NIGHTS LATER,
they busted Lil Pat for armed robbery. Nearly all the heroin dealers on the North Side refused to sell to him, and many had even bulked up security just in case Lil Pat and Fat Buck tried to stick them up again. So, Lil Pat went pharmaceutical. He'd managed to get several high-dosage pain prescriptions, and since the union was still kicking out for insurance, he was getting high almost for free.  When the insurance ran out, Lil Pat got strung-out. He went into the pharmacy with the .45 and had them hand over several hundred dollars worth of Oxycontin. He even put the .45 under a pregnant woman's maternity dress to encourage the pharmacist to hurry up. She was a Filipino woman—mid-twenties, with that flushed glow of a soon-to-be mother. She was eight-to-nine months, with her round belly just hovering above that cold-metal .45 pointed up at that life yet to take a breath.

They I.D.'d him easy. There was no way out of it. The cops wanted him bad because of the pregnant lady thing, and they came to the house looking for him. I remember the heavy banging at the door and the officers pouring in with a search warrant. Their hands clasped on their police issue 9s. Officer O'Riley showed up. He frowned—his gray-speckled mustache hung over his top lip. He stepped through the front door slowly, and his Mick-red face bowed. The cops left after the house was searched, and I sat at the top of the stairs and listened to O'Riley talk with my father. I'll never forget my father's cracked voice—the voice of a broken man without the choice of giving in.

“He needs help,” my father said. “I don't know what else to do.”

“There's nothing you can do, Pat,” Officer O'Riley said. “He's gotta face the music on this one.”

Later that night, the phone rang, and I heard my father's voice downstairs. I got up and walked to the top of the landing and listened to my father convince Lil Pat to put the .45 in a dumpster behind the Jewel on Ashland. Afterward, Dad called the cops and told them where they could find the gun. Then, later, it was Lil Pat again. I listened as my father convinced him to turn himself in. He ended up getting sent for six years.

It's a strange thing to walk around the neighborhood with everybody knowing your brother's in the Pen. The clean part of the neighborhood looks at you like you're trash and expects you to be bad. I'd be playing with kids like normal when their mothers would call them in. It got so they didn't come ask me to play ball out behind St. Greg's gym no more. I remember the last time I came around to see the clean kids. I saw Mike Thompson walk out his front door with a mitt and bat, and I rode up to him and asked if he was gonna play a game and if I could come. Mrs. Thompson appeared at his front door and called him in. He shrugged and said sorry. I remember how after he passed her inside she stood at the screen door looking at me a long time. Not saying nothing, but saying everything with her frowning bitter face…
My son will not play with the likes of you.
Rifts swelled between me and clean kids. I started to hate them. At the same time, the dark part of the neighborhood looks at you with respect. Guys hanging out and sipping beers on front porches would say things like, “Ohh dat's lil Walsh, Patty's little brother,” then give me a sip of their beer while they asked how Lil Pat was doing in there. And the bad kids—the kinds with families just like yours—seem to hang around ya more 'cause the clean part looks at them the same way. So it gets to the point that you do bad shit 'cause it's what the clean part wants. So they know they are nothing like you, and so you know you are nothing like them.

CHAPTER 9

SIMON

THEY KILLED SY
over a stereo. Sounds petty, I know. It was.

This gang called the PG3s sprouted up a few blocks north of us around Granville and Clark. They mainly hung out around Hayt Elementary School's playground, which had this big asphalt baseball diamond with one of those pitched-roof field houses in the corner. The park was encircled by a tall chain-link fence. They were a mixed bag—whites, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and black's. They were mostly teenagers; there were no real old-school heads ‘cause they just didn't have any history. They were renegades, meaning they didn't take sides in the huge rift between street gangs in Chicago known as the Nations. Back then, nearly all the individual gangs in the city fell under alliance with either the Folks Nation or the Peoples Nation. Endless wars raged between them. Being on your own like that in a big city is a difficult thing. It makes you an easy target for both sides, and as result, in the few years of their existence, the PG3s had become pretty ruthless.

One of the big problems with not being part of a Nation was the lack of access to quality drugs. The heroin and cocaine the PG3s did get a hold of was stomped on vigorously, so by the time they tried to bag it and sell it, even hungriest junkies and crackheads were sticking their noses up at it.

Even their weed was bunk.

Sy had gotten hold of a quarter-pound of kind bud from some Outlaws—this big biker crew from McCook out in the suburbs. Like I said, Sy just knew everybody. He worked part-time at a record store and sold the bud to help pay rent. He'd moved into this little second-floor apartment across from the hospital on Hollywood.

I witnessed the whole thing go down in stages, but nothing could have told me what was coming. It was like watching a bad car wreck in slow motion when the only thing you should do, you can't, which is close your eyes.

•

WHEN I WAS A KID,
Andersonville was only considered the shopping district—that strip of Swedish shops along Clark before it hit Ashland. What solidified this for me and all the rest of us was the Edgewater Hospital, which sat at Ashland and Hollywood. It was this towering tan concrete structure that loomed high and wide like a monolith. You could see it from just about anywhere in our little nook of Edgewater. It had an eerie omnipresence, like it was following us. Just above the pitched roofs and between the narrow gangways, there it was, always. We'd all been in that ER at least once with broken bones, cuts that needed stitches, and worse. Many of us had been born there, and more than a few of our relatives had died inside those ominous, concrete walls. The raw, divergent power of that monolith drew us kids like a magnet.

We'd started hanging out at the window sills along the Hollywood side of the hospital. It was something to do, and you could always expect to find somebody hanging out there. Plus, we had benches to sit on. Well, not exactly benches; they were the ledges of these deep-cut windows built right into the concrete wall of the hospital like rectangular vaults that were deep enough that you could fit in four 12-year-old kids sitting Indian style. They were tall, too. Real tall—like ten feet—so if you were standing in one, you couldn't jump and touch the top. The windows were for the accounting offices, so the lights in 'em were out by six or seven at night, and the older guys would curl up in there with a girl to make out, or at least that's what they were constantly bragging about. We were always graffiti'n the inside walls of the sills with markers. They rarely cleaned 'em 'cause you really couldn't see anything unless you stuck your head inside. There were illustrations of strange sexual acts involving men, women, dogs, gorillas, and horses. The drawings were accompanied by silly taglines inside bubbles that read, “Giddy up!” “Give it to me, ya big ape,” or “Take it, Bitch!”

Then, there were random curse words, people's nicknames, a big pot leaf, Metallica
Ride the Lightning
, and stuff like “Sue+Angel” with a heart around it. You could spend a whole afternoon just reading the crap the kids had written in all three of the sills. And just when it got cluttered enough and we were running out of space, the city's graffiti blaster'd come in, put some padding on the glass, sandblast it all clean and fresh, and we'd get to start all over again.

The other part about hanging out at the sills that made it fun was that on weekend nights (and pretty much any night) there'd be a steady flow of ambulances. And depending on if the huge black security guard we called Big James was on duty or in a good mood, we got to walk up and get a little peek at the patients coming in. Sometimes, it was old people that just had a stroke or something, but other times, it was car accidents or violence. We saw a lot of nasty crap in that emergency room tunnel. It burrowed through the width of the hospital, paralleling Ashland and continuing to the arterial alley. Looking back now, I can't believe they let us kids lurk around like that, but I guess they couldn't 'a stopped us even if they'd tried, though Big James would run us off sometimes when we got too boisterous and annoying. I guess you could say that it was a sick thing to do, and that if our parents knew what we were doing, they'd have beat the crap outta us. What if the ambulances brought in someone we loved? We wouldn't be wisecracking and ogling the ER patients then, and you'd be right. But kids just don't think like that. What drew us was the same reason people watch reality shows today, or “ER” for Christ's sake: people love realistic drama. Strangely enough, it's a way of readying us for the inevitability of our own tragedies, our loved ones' deaths, and our own. So maybe it ain't so sick after all. We're all curious, right? And we all know sooner or later, it's coming.

It was a little different for Ryan and I than for the others. The Assyrian's dead soul still haunted us. We dreamt of him and of the gore of that night years past, and I think we sought to find a control over our emotions surrounding death and the horrific to fortify our nerves and deaden our hearts to the torment we knew laid ahead.

•

THE FIRST TIME I SAW A PG3,
I was down at the sills a couple years after Lil Pat got locked up. Ryan, Angel, and I had become an inseparable clique. My silent connection with Ryan was still strong; witnessing that together at such a young age and losing people to long-term lockups like we had had bound us tight. But getting to know Angel more and more—his weird, perverse sense of humor and his sly way of picking at people—just had me laughing incessantly. Those two were kind of a yin and yang for me: the hard, serious Ryan, and the goofy prankster Angel. We were just punk-ass 12-year-olds trying to find our sense of style. Still ain't even hit puberty and stuck between being little boys and mean teens. Even though we'd seen more than most, we were still playing video games and watching cartoons. We were still liable to fall into a game of tag or hide and go seek with the younger kids, get caught by one another and frozen into rigid embarrassment, and then spend the rest of the day scowling and puffing cigarettes to prove how cold and tough we were, going on about all the guys we'd whooped on and all the girlfriends we had in other neighborhoods. We'd be sitting there at the sills breaking down all the TJO lit we knew. Which gangs were Peoples and which were Folks, and just listing off all the white gangs: Popes, Jousters, Gaylords, Royals.