Chicago

by Brian Doyle

  Finally the train began moving again, but because there had been no warning for the sudden resumption of service it was nearly empty, and the tailor took advantage of the acoustics to sing an old island song his grandfather had taught him. I didn’t catch the title of the song but I still remember a couple of lines: May the hills lie low, may the sloughs fill up, may all evil sleep, may the good awake. As we walked home to the building the tailor tried to teach us to sing but I sing like a frog and Edward could not stay in the right key no matter how hard he tried.

  18.

  SOMETIMES I THINK I have been so fixated on the apartment building and its residents that I have not given a full enough account of the amazing things that happened to me as I wandered footloose around the city. In those days I was young and fit and tireless and penniless and relentlessly curious, and I had neither kith nor kin in Chicago, and was not yet wholly absorbed by romance, and was adamantly dedicated only to basketball, so I walked endlessly, for to be pedestrian cost not a penny, and I was untrammeled by routes or fares, and did not have to worry about where to park a car or stash a bicycle. So I walked; and there were days when I thought it likely that I had walked farther and deeper in Chicago that day than anyone else in the whole city, and this was a city of three million souls.

  Many of whom I met: some briefly, with only a word of greeting, like the enormous center for the Chicago Bulls basketball team, Artis Gilmore, who was not only seven feet tall but had an Afro easily another ten inches high; he and I passed each other on Madison Street one day, and I said hello, and he said hello, and he had the most wonderfully resonant voice, like a bass drum or a cello in its lowest register. I met a roan horse walking down Lincoln Avenue, a moment I remember vividly not only for the unusual sighting (usually the only horses I saw were wearing helmeted policemen) but for the fact that the horse nodded hello as he or she walked by. I met buskers by the score, a hundred street basketball players, dozens of people fishing the lake (one of my habits was to stop and ask what they were fishing for, to get a sense of what lived in the lake). I met librarians and bookshop owners and probably every gyro vendor north and west of the Loop. I met train conductors and bus drivers and taxi drivers; another of my habits, that summer, was to walk along a line of lounging taxi drivers outside a theater or the ballpark and, explaining that I was a journalist, ask them about themselves. I met teachers and policemen (curiously never a policewoman) and many mayoral candidates—it seemed like every other person in the city that year was running for mayor—and bartenders.

  It was a bartender, come to think of it, who made me realize that the dapper businessmen in 3A and 3B were right about the future of the neighborhood. A man named Raymond tended bar at the Closet, around the corner on Broadway, which was set up in such a way that the bar was immediately accessible from the door; you could take a single step into the bar and signal to Raymond, who would pull you a beer as you stared up at the television by the door, which was always set to sports. I had popped by for a beer a few times without ever stepping more than three feet into the bar, being a man even then easily distracted by sports and their intense theatrical grace; I would step in off the street, signal Raymond for a beer, and then get so absorbed in the game that I didn’t pay any attention to the other patrons at all.

  One Saturday in June I ran along the lake dribbling my ball left-handed for an hour, and then ran back down Broadway cross-dribbling and dribbling behind my back and conducting spinning reverse pivots around startled dog-walkers, and when I got back to my street I popped into the Closet for a beer. Just as I signaled to Raymond, a friendly man next to me asked me to dance. I declined politely, and when Raymond came over with my beer I asked him what’s with the guy asking people to dance?

  “Listen,” says Raymond, “do you know what kind of bar this is?”

  “It’s a very friendly bar,” I said, “and you have cable, too, bless your soul.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Raymond.

  “What do you mean? And can you see if the Sox are on? They play the Twins today.”

  “Let’s try another tack,” said Raymond patiently. “Do you know what your nickname is in the neighborhood?”

  “I have a nickname?” I said, feeling cool and local.

  “Yes. You didn’t know that?”

  “No.”

  “You do have a nickname. People call you Het.”

  “Heck?”

  “Het. Which is short for…?”

  “Hector?”

  “No,” said Raymond, patiently. “Let’s try another tack. You’re a heterosexual guy, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but that’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it?”

  “Well,” said Raymond, “we are not.”

  “Not what?”

  “Heterosexual. Everyone calls you Het because you are and we are not.”

  At which point I finally got the picture, which I have to say instantly changed my view of the Closet, which I suddenly saw was filled with people dancing with people of their own personal gender. I finished my beer, which Raymond gave me on the house, and the Sox won that day, with eight runs on sixteen hits, two of them homers.

  The very next day I was walking along Broadway, marveling at my new knowledge of the neighborhood, and noticing things I had not noticed before, like two men walking along bound by a very thin silver chain at their belts, and a woman on the bus dressed completely in cellophane except for a huge red belt, and a lot of women with meticulous short haircuts, which I had vaguely assumed had something to do with summer, when in the distance I heard the faint approach of trumpets and drums. It sounded exactly like a parade approaching, which indeed it proved to be, but it was not a parade like any I had known in the past, for this was, bless my soul, the Chicago Gay Pride Parade, which wound north to south through the city, and apparently reached its apotheosis in my neighborhood, for everyone near me politely went bonkers, with people dancing in the street, and wearing feathers and masks, and laughing and cheering at the wild motley of the marchers, and roaring with applause at a tableau of what I later discovered were the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York, a sort of independence day.

  People were so packed along the parade route on our street that we really were crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, like at a baseball game you really care about, for example the White Sox that year, and by chance I found that I was shoulder-to-shoulder with Raymond the bartender, right in front of the gyro shop. You could hardly hear a voice in the tumult, but I shouted into his ear that I was grateful to him for setting me straight, as it were, and he shouted back no problem, that’s what neighbors are for, man, and we both grinned, and we all stayed pressed together on the curb for another few minutes, cheering and laughing, until the parade finally wandered away and little kids and dogs ran out to grab feathers and coins. I love that part of parades, when the main business has left the scene and there’s still laughter in the air and glitter in the puddles and kids and dogs are whirling around for no reason and even though everyone probably has to go places and do things, they don’t, quite, yet.

  * * *

  July was the month when apartments in our building turned over the most, Mr Pawlowsky had explained, because people who were moving wanted to be set in their new places before school started, while it was still warm and dry enough to move couches and tables easily, and while they could borrow friends’ pickup trucks and not have to tarp the load; and also people moving to Chicago from elsewhere, like college graduates getting their first real jobs, wanted to get into their places and settle down and get to know the neighborhood and the grocery store and the garbage collection schedule and the bus schedules before they got sucked into work. And as July proceeded, the building saw its first changes in a year.

  First Ovious and his mother, in apartment 4F, left. Ovious’s mother’s boyfriend had formally extended the invitation to come live with him in his house on Cermak Road, on the west side, in an old Czech neighborhood, and Ovious’s mother had
accepted the offer. According to Edward, Ovious himself was not thrilled about this for a number of reasons, but he and his mother moved out on a Saturday, Mr Pawlowsky and the sailor in the basement doing most of the heavy lifting. I had been away all afternoon playing ball and caught just the tail end of the move when I came back up the street, dribbling with my left hand; Ovious, sitting glumly atop a piano in the bed of a truck. I waved and called his name and he looked up but didn’t wave as the truck pulled away, although weirdly the piano suddenly groaned a low chord—C, I think.

  Next to leave were the two young women from Arkansas in 4E; they were moving closer to downtown with two of their friends from college, and they were gone in an hour, assisted by a sudden efficient crew of tall muscular young men whom I took to be suitors. That left 4E open as well, and the librettist joked that it must have been his Harry Mark Petrakis oratorio that drove away residents on his side of the hall, this did not bode well for its success, etc.

  Finally there came a serious blow—the four dapper businessmen in 3A and 3B moved out. Financially prescient as they were, they had foreseen not only the changing demographics of the neighborhood, but its incipient rise in property values, and they had joined forces to buy not one but two narrow buildings on Cornelia Avenue, a couple of blocks away. The good news was that they would not be far away, and that we were all welcome to stop by at any time; the bad news was that they would be very much missed, as they were generous and cheerful men, always quick to help any resident, and to provide just the smile or wry quip you needed when you slogged home feeling weary and bedraggled, only to find one or two of the businessmen, beautifully dressed and beaming, on their way out to dinner or a show. Something about them always cheered you up; as the librettist said once, they always made you feel vaguely as if you were in a movie somehow with Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, a lovely feeling. They left in the evening, just as the Corona Borealis constellation was becoming visible to the north, and Miss Elminides shook hands silently with each of them on the front steps of the building, as many of the rest of us watched from the lobby. Mrs Manfredi cried.

  So now, what with Eugenia’s apartment 3C also empty, five of the apartments were without tenants; but by the end of that month they were all filled again, and this is how that happened.

  It turned out that the dapper businessmen, in exploring property values in the neighborhood, had taken a thorough and meticulous look at the convent around the corner, and concluded that the best approach financially was for the nuns to sell it to a developer, who would tear it down and put up condominiums. The nuns, who could not afford repair and upkeep on the old wooden building (and there was a stunning amount of repair necessary, after a century of benign neglect), would realize a serious amount of money, enough to either make a deposit on another residence or use as an endowment from which to pay living expenses; the dapper businessmen, knowing how developers would drool over such a location near the lake and minutes from downtown, could easily require the establishment of a whopping health care fund as part of the negotiations.

  By now the nuns were down to ten members, from a high of fifty at their apex, thirty years before. They had so few members that they no longer bothered to elect a Mother Superior, but instead took turns “being sentenced to being the nominal authority,” as Sister Maureen said, smiling. Sister Maureen was the grinning nun who had sold me my bed and table and chair for fifty dollars when I had moved into the apartment building, and since then I had been over to the convent several times with Edward and Mr Pawlowsky for small repair jobs for which we were paid in laughter. You never met a happier band of survivors than those nuns, who were not at all bitter that they were in ostensible decline, but rather energized that the archdiocese seemed to have forgotten about them, which allowed them to do whatever they thought most necessary to do. Three of them still taught in schools; one was a roving nurse; one wrote sermons and homilies for a company that provided texts for priests and ministers of all denominations; one worked in sales and repair at a bicycle shop on Belmont Avenue; three were aged and frail, and did not often leave the convent, but did still offer spiritual consultations and direction to former students; and there was Sister Maureen, who had discovered at age thirty that she was a gifted plumber, so good that she gave Mr Pawlowsky pointers about equipment and trends in the industry.

  It was Sister Maureen, as nominal authority that year, who made the decision to sell. For all that she loved the old boat of a building, she said, and for all that she and her sisters loved the stories and legends and love and joy in the place over the years, and for all they loved the angles of light and the idiosyncrasies of a home in which they had lived most of their lives, they could see the writing on the wall; the future, financially, could only grow dimmer as the building fell ever more into decline, and the sisters too. The decision was clear, and made far easier than it might have been, she told Mr Pawlowsky, because they trusted the dapper businessmen implicitly, and indeed had left all financial details to them. Thus the convent was sold on the last day of July, on a complicated contract that entailed a tax-exempt fund for their health care costs, money set aside for moving expenses, a bonus payment designed to ease transition costs, the promise of a historical exhibit about the sisters and their legacy in the new buildings, and lifetime use of the rooftop sundeck. The sisters had the whole month of August to pack up their possessions and find other living arrangements.

  But just as Sister Maureen and the dapper businessmen were set to begin site visits for possible apartments, Miss Elminides offered the ten sisters the five vacant apartments, at ten percent below market rate. The sisters met at breakfast to consider the offer, prayed over it in their tiny upstairs chapel, and then accepted the offer unanimously that afternoon.

  * * *

  In the last days of July Edward and I went on a terrific burst of historical sightseeing, covering a remarkable amount of the city at an incredible pace. Years later, remembering how many places we went in so few days, I wondered at what seemed almost manic behavior; but I think now that Edward had some intuition of my leaving, and he wanted to be sure to soak me in Chicagoness through and through, to the very bone—although it was more like to the very soles of my feet, as I actually wore a hole in my right sneaker during those days, and had to borrow a pair of sneakers from Denesh the cricket player for a while.

  We went to Daley’s Restaurant, on the far south side, where we had whitefish from the lake. We had enormous hamburgers at Lou Mitchell’s on the west side and the Green Door Tavern on the north side. We went to the glorious old dark wooden Berghoff restaurant on Adams Street in the Loop, where Edward pretended to be a guide dog and I had a beer at the vast curving bar. We tried to find the house where Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers was born in 1939. We went to the Wise Fools Pub to hear Koko Taylor, and to Kingston Mines to hear Eddy Clearwater and Miss Lavelle White, and to a club called John’s to hear John Littlejohn. We went to an outdoor concert (the great jazz pianist Dave Brubeck) at Ravinia Park, way up north by the Chicago Botanic Garden. We went to jazz clubs on the south side to hear a very young Mulgrew Miller and a masterful McCoy Tyner, who slipped into the club at midnight to play a set on the harpsichord, an instrument I had never heard played so hauntingly before.

  Again we studiously avoided any site having anything to do with crime, as Edward felt strongly that crime ought not to be encouraged by tourism. We went back to the Billy Goat Tavern on Michigan Avenue by the river, Edward not pretending to be a guide dog this time but getting his own bowl of beer. We went to the site of the old Chicago Beach Hotel, which used to be on the lakefront on the deep South Side, until the city filled in the lakefront there to build Lake Shore Drive, which meant that the Beach Hotel no longer had a beach, which meant that it went out of business.

  Lovely old theaters like the Congress and the Portage, on the north side, and the Ramova and the Music Box, on the South Side. Raceway Park, on the South Side, where we stood outside the old walls and felt the roar
of stock cars circling and thundering inside. Wrigley Field, which was only about a twenty-minute walk from the apartment building, but which we would not enter for superstitious reasons having to do with hexing the White Sox if we stepped inside a National League park, beautiful though it was—although we did happily have a beer across the street at Ray’s Bleachers bar, where Edward spotted none other than Bill Veeck, owner of the White Sox, holding court at a table covered with Schlitz beer cans and his wooden leg; he had lost the original leg while in the Marines in the war. Lovely old castles of hotels downtown like the Drake and the Palmer House, through which we wandered gaping at the ornate details, Edward again posing as a guide dog.

  We walked along the river as far as we could, on both banks; we made a game of sprinting through every park we could find; we cut through every alley that looked promising and mysterious, secure in the knowledge that I could outrun trouble and Edward could, if necessary, defeat it physically; we made a pact to walk atop any stone or brick wall with enough purchase for our feet. Edward got into the habit of checking with local dogs in neighborhoods he did not know, and their advice often led us to odd fascinating corners and sights—obscure fountains, remarkable trees, once a hidden aviary with more than a hundred parrots and parakeets of every color and species, tended by a tiny old man who could not have been more than four feet high.