The Old Neighborhood (25 page)

•

RICH HAD TO SELL
the Ramcharger after handmade neon-pink wanted posters of him started to circulate along Clark near the gay bar where he'd shot those guys with paintballs. He'd bought a little black Toyota pickup that had a lift kit and gigantic Mudder tires with gnarly tread.

He said there were some great dirt trails way west near Central Avenue for off-roading, and it was a blast. So, I went out there with him one weekend. It was a long ride, and he didn't start up with the ranting until we were almost there. Once he gets you in the tight cab of a vehicle, something comes over him, and he just starts to let you have it. The confined space shrinks. Trapped, you start having claustrophobia. Somehow he got on the subject of Blake recently becoming a Chicago police officer.

“I can't fucking believe Blakey's a cop. Crazy fucking shit the way things turn out. That accounting job he had flopped. They were paying him like twelve bucks an hour. He was nothing more than a secretary!!! Hahahah….”

We knifed through the tight, winding trails. The deep, water-filled ruts splashed up waves. We rambled on as the overgrown foliage slapped at the windows.

“That's why he took the test to become a copper. All of that money Ma and Dad paid for him to go to school, and he gets a gig chasing down fucking Ricans and niggers on the West Side! And you don't even need a degree to be a pig; all's you need is a high school diploma. I could go take the test right now, but fuck it, I wouldn't! I'm making more than him as a frickin' carpenter!”

We came into an opening, and there was a muddy pit with a half-built concrete manhole structure sitting in the center. Green-epoxied rebar sprouted up from the freshly stripped walls.

“But one good thing's come outta this: all his speechy crap about how blacks, browns and whites are equal and the same and should have the same opportunities—that's all gone now, man.”

He floored it toward a path that twisted into greenery. “It took six months for him to wake up to the fact that they're all sewer rats. He's plain-clothed one night, picked up by some special gang unit, and he's sitting there on North Ave. right by Humboldt Park. Him and his partner got out of their unmarked squad car, and they're wearing black and yellow. All of a sudden, somebody shouts
‘
King Killa' from across the street and—Pop!-Pop!-Pop!—some little Spanish Cobra's shooting at 'em.” We ascended a muddy hill, and Rich floored it. When we reached the top, there was nothing. The shocks sprang and locked out, and we vaulted into the air. Rich smirked at me through his tangled beard. We plummeted and landed in an explosion of mud, then we bound on.

Years later, I'd hear it from Blake himself during a lunch break—he was catching some extra hours as a carpenter, and I was working my summer vacation as a laborer. 

“So, my partner, this fat Mexican guy named Perez, starts sprinting right at 'em. I figure I'll cut through the alley and head 'em off,” Blake elaborated, then took a pull on the straw of his Wendy's cup of Coke. “I'm flying down that alley. I'm telling ya, I'm booking faster than frickin' Carl Lewis ever ran!” He laughed as I took a bite of my spicy chicken sandwich. The traffic on 55 howled past and made the cab of the pickup truck bobble. We sat on the shoulder, right in front of the Harlem Avenue bridge. “I can hear my partner firing on him with the .9—boom-boom-boom! I see an open gangway and cut through it, get to the mouth, and peek my head around, making sure I don't get caught in the crossfire. Then, the shooter screams out, throws the gun, and falls flat to his belly on the muddy grass. But I know he's not hit—he's fakin', playin' possum.”

“I shout for Perez to stop shooting, dash out, snag the guy by his shoulders, and lift him up. Then, I realize his feet are dangling two feet off the ground. He's a kid—twelve years old, maybe, his face a smear of tears. But Perez is still running up, and in full-stride he kicks this kid in the balls so hard that he flies right up out of my grip and lands on the hood of the parked Chevy right next to us.”

A malicious grin streaked across his face as he finished. My heart pulsed and squeaked. Images of my brother getting shot at flickered through my mind. I thought of his kids. What if Karen got a call in the middle of the night saying he was dead—gone—just like that?

A frowning sneer wrenched onto his mouth, and he gazed out onto the wide, sloping circle of yellow grass between us and the off ramp. “They're animals,” he said, and threw the half-full Wendy's cup out the open window. He yanked the door lever and got out, then he slung his tool belt over his shoulders, bent, and yanked the cord on the gas-powered generator. It rippled and petered, then it rambled up to its steady roar. He stepped briskly into the shade of the concrete bridge; the long gray I-beams spanned its underbelly like ribs. The other truck and car doors strung along the shoulder yawned open slowly.

CHAPTER 17

PHYSICAL SCIENCE

IT'S FUNNY HOW WHEN YOU'RE A KID,
one little spark can engulf you in flames.

I didn't try on the high school entrance exam, so they put me in the lowest track at Gordon Tech. I didn't really give a shit. School was never my thing, and this would make it easier to do less and still pass. Don't get me wrong—I listened to shit that interested me. It's just almost nothing I'd ever heard a teacher say sounded interesting.

That's when I stepped into the Mr. Dydecky's Physical World class—the dumb-kid physics. The room had faded linoleum tile floors with five rows of long black-topped tables spanning its width that sat four students each. I walked in and sat in back. Then, I flopped my tie on the table, folded my arms over it, slipped my chin into the nook of my elbow, and braced for boredom. A lot of the kids in there were on the football team—the big meathead linemen mostly. Dydecky was a young guy, maybe twenty-something. He was skinny and wore an off-yellow button-down shirt and a frickin
'
brown bow-tie. He had short, curly, black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. His thick, bushy unibrow wiggled on his face when he talked.

Everyone was bored out of their fucking minds, which was usual with the low-track. On the far side of the back row, a tall, lanky Polish kid exchanged shoulder shots with a pudgy Mexican kid with no neck; his head just popped out of his balloon of a torso like the top ball of a snowman. Both of them snickered and shrieked like a couple rejects.

Then, this guy Dydecky starts talking about physics. The motherfucker's blabbin' like ninety miles per hour about this shit and that. He's drawing multicolored pictures on the big white marker board and jumping from mechanics to thermodynamics without really making any connections. His hands are all trembling like he's got the shakes, and I started thinking the dude was having some kind of a breakdown! But then, he starts in on the universe, galaxies, the solar system, the sun, and what's going down in there. And his beady, brown eyes are glowing behind them glasses like the fuckin' guy's possessed by a demon! But the stuff he's talking about starts sparking shit off in my head. Got me thinking about everything—I mean
everything
.

I'd been hearing all this BS about Genesis for years, but the Hindus had their own creation story. Hell, some of the Native American tribes believed in the god of the Earth or the Sun. That shit made more sense to me than Allah or Yahweh or Zeus. The sun might have been the source of all life. Photosynthesis in plants, hell, even fundamental organisms like plankton needed light to thrive. I mean, what the hell was light, anyway? The shit is elemental to every day of my life, and I had no idea what it was even made out of.

I never spoke in class. Never paid much attention either, but all this talk was about something big—something beyond the bland bullshit of the day-to-day. It got my veins pulsing. All the distrust I had for the whole of education and religion was cleared—right then and there—hearing that scrawny little poindexter talking about physics. And I swear I was the only one listening. I looked a row up, and Owen, the fat-ass starting offensive tackle, was trying to see how many Starbursts he could stuff in his mouth at once without getting caught. Some little half-black kid in the front row with a giant light-brown afro was snoring so loud I could hear him in back. And Dydecky didn't even notice. He just kept going, rattling this shit off until the bell rang.

I found myself reading from the textbook at lunch. Reading! I barely knew anyone in the whole school! These motherfuckers were surely gonna think I was a fucking dork, but I didn't give a shit. I was looking up words: electromagnetic waves, gamma rays, photons.

And by that night, I find myself standing up in the middle of the garage giving a fucking lecture to Angel and Ryan as they worked on their bikes. Ryan was on one knee near the door, and his hands were all greased up with WD-40. The monkey wrench clamped down on the neck of my sister's old Huffy as he tried to get the rusted nut to turn to free the stem and ape hanger handlebars. Angel was sitting on the couch sanding down an old-school sprocket with a patch of fine sandpaper so he could get it chromed. And I'm standing under the naked bulb hanging down from the rafters shouting like I'm on a soapbox.

“The sun puts out, like, a few different kinds of those electromagnetic waves—light was just one spectrum, one energy level. And the colors aren't like you know 'em. Fuck that color-wheel crap you learn in art class—it don't mean nothin'. And white is when all the colors of light focus to one point, and black is the absence of light.”

“You're making me dizzy, man,” Ryan said, laughing.

“Naw, but what the sun is, is it's a big ball of hydrogen, ya know? Like the most basic element, but what's happening is there's so much of it—it's so dense—that it's compressing with all this energy 'cause of the gravity. It's heating up so fucking hot, and there's this thing that happens way inside: the hydrogen gets changed into helium.”

“Like a balloon?” Ryan asked, flashing his crooked teeth at me
.

“Yeah, but like, when that happens, it gives off, like, a nuclear explosion and emits all this radiation out into space. And part of it is light, but it also puts out X-rays and gamma rays and all kindsa rays. Gamma rays'll fucking kill your ass quick, but check this out: this reaction way down in the center of the sun… It's called
nuclear fusion
.”

“That's dope. Like lighting a fuse?” Angel asked, looking up for a second.

“Man, that's the name for the crew, man!” I urged.

“I don't know, man. It sounds like some nerdy shit to me,” Ryan said as he gave me a dismissive wave, then went back to cranking on the monkey wrench.

“So fusion is like an explosion?” Angel asked, squinting up at me.

“Yeah, sorta. It's like a slow explosion of energy,” I answered.

“And that's what makes the sun shine and warm and all that?” Ryan asked, looking up again. His brow furrowed.

“Yeah. It's about the pressure that brings things together to create something new, and then it's changed forever and can't never go back,” I said.

Ryan scratched the peach-fuzz under his chin.

“Call it 'Fusion,' 'cause we down forever, and we emit motherfuckin' gamma rays! Fucking photon these motherfuckers!” I shouted.

Angel and Ryan burst out laughing.

Within three nights,
Fusion
was spray painted in neon-orange forty-seven times throughout the neighborhood. We even had to start burning our tag sketches out of our notebooks 'cause so many people were complainin'. Ryan did this big bubble-letter bomb on the side of 7-Eleven's red-brick wall that looked like shit but proclaimed our presence in the neighborhood like a foghorn blowin' in the dead of night.

•

I KNEW TANK
wanted a piece of me. He was BB's uncle—seems like some fucked up math right? Well, I knew it was true because Tank had knocked out this fat Mexican kid over it. The kid had poked fun at their age difference and asked if he was sure they weren't cousins. Funny, after all the guys I'd seen Tank whomp over the years, I still thought I had a decent chance. He was twenty pounds heavier than me and not an ounce of it slack. I guess I just believed somewhere way deep inside myself that everyone was mortal, vulnerable. Even Tank.

I stood outside 7-Eleven with a few stoners and a couple hood rats and chatted as we drank Slurpees. Suddenly, I heard a shout up Clark and turned. I saw Tank sprinting straight towards me from about a block down. My heart pumped buckets. I readied—a cool buzz hummed in my fists. A plan unfolded in my head. I was gonna stay real still, wait until he got within arm's reach, then crack him and dodge to the side like a matador. But then, behind Tank, I saw T-Money, Monteff, and Twon, then BB lagging behind them. BB craned his head back and let out a high-pitched battle cry. T-Money clutched a pool stick or a cane—I couldn't be sure. I broke south on Clark along the sidewalk. Tank's footsteps pounded closer. I imagined him making a leaping tackle on me, so I cut out into traffic. A Checker Cab slammed on its brakes and horn as I cut through its headlights. I filed down the center of the two-lane traffic as car horns blew like a Beethoven symphony. Feeling them closing in, I made a split second decision and cut into Calo Restaurant. I decelerated and walked inside, then I strolled to the back and sat down at a vacant booth. There was a serrated steak knife sitting atop my napkin, so I picked it up and clutched it under the table, still breathless. I watched the door. They suddenly appeared at the window, argued, then Twon and BB sprinted back down the street. I saw T-Money mouth “Alley” to Tank, and I wished I'd thought of it first. Then, I wondered if I could have made it through the kitchen or if the cooks would have grabbed me. Hell, I didn't even know where the backdoor was. A waiter placed a black-leather menu on the white-clothed table.