by Randy Alcorn
His bathroom looked like something out of a magazine. Ivory-like washbasin with what looked like gold-plated handles. A private Jacuzzi! Clarence felt on top of the world. After exploring every feature of his suite, he walked out in the hall, passing by other well-dressed occupants.
He pulled in his stomach and pushed out his chest a bit. He could think of worse ways to spend the evening—like in Cabrini Green, where he would go first thing tomorrow morning to his cousin Franky’s. Clarence felt excited about doing this inner-city feature article, especially since most Trib columnists got a feature assignment maybe once a year, if that. As he walked to the elevator, a service cart came around the corner in front of him, ramming into his thigh.
“Oh, sir, I’m so sorry.” The silver-dollar-sized eyes looked even more frightened and apologetic than the voice sounded. The nameless black woman, about Clarence’s own age, seemed terrified, as if she had offended royalty who at a whim could command her beheaded.
“No problem,” Clarence assured her, aware of the patronizing tone of his own voice—kind, magnanimous, the sort royalty uses with inferiors to remind themselves of their philanthropy.
“Forgive me, sir.”
He didn’t know what he saw in her eyes, and it bothered him. Was it mortification at having done a terrible offense? Or was it that she felt wonder or envy that one of her kind had made it to Clarence’s station in life, that he could actually stay in such a place, not just be a bellhop or cleaner or candy machine supplier here? He sensed she had expected a white man and had been surprised to see him. Were blacks who had “made it” even more insufferable than whites, who take their privilege for granted?
He took the elevator down to the lobby and looked the place over. He saw a sign that said, “Ritz restrooms for guests only.” Outside of it stood a tall young black man who had pumped his share of iron. He wore a tuxedo.
A restroom bouncer? In a tuxedo?
Clarence wandered into the plush restroom, which had a huge lounge area with chairs and paintings, then inside it another section with washbasins, and finally beyond that the facilities people actually went to bathrooms for in the first place. He remembered the Mississippi outhouse he visited a few times a day until he was ten years old and they finally got indoor plumbing.
He didn’t really need to use the Ritz restroom; he was just exploring. The works of art hanging on the wall made it seem an ivory-colored museum. He wondered if artists considered it a great honor to have their paintings hanging in a John.
Opulence knows no boundaries.
Clarence turned the corner to the room with washbasins, then stopped in his tracks. There, in a fancy antique chair, sat an old man, maybe fifteen years younger than his father but looking remarkably like him. He was dressed in a starched white smock that cut a stark contrast to his leathery old sunbeaten black skin. He was working, if it could be called that, as an attendant, waiting to hand a towel to any hotel guest who’d washed his hands. He sat listlessly. In front of him, propped on an ornate pedestal, rested a shiny silver plate for tips. In it were some dollar bills and a fair stack of assorted change.
The man seemed frail and sad-eyed. A white man moved from a washbasin as if looking for a hand towel rack or a blow-dryer. He realized there was only one recourse—the old man who was guardian and distributor of the hand towels. As the white man walked toward the black man, the latter looked up with puppy eyes, handing him the towel with all the devotion of a loyal spaniel. Without saying a word, the white man wiped his hands, placed the used towel in a neat receptacle that somebody—maybe this attendant himself or maybe a black woman—would wash and fold. He reached in his front pocket and found no change, then into his wallet and pulled out a dollar bill.
The old man smiled weakly and nodded his thanks. As the white man walked away, the attendant’s eyes caught Clarence’s. For a moment the two stood there gazing at each other. At first Clarence thought the old man was silently asking if he could serve him a towel, but the eyes had something else in them, something he recognized immediately because he’d seen it so often in his life. Shame.
Clarence turned and walked out. He went straight to the elevator, directly to his room, changed his clothes, and packed his bags. He left a note for Mr. Sam Knight saying his plans had changed, but thanks for the room and the nice fruit and flowers.
He went out to catch a taxi. After three empty cabs passed him, the drivers pretending not to see his waving hand, he went back into the hotel and asked the concierge to call him a cab. One drove up immediately to the hotel’s front entrance, and he climbed in.
“Where we goin’ today, sir?” said the old black driver, an American, rather than the usual Nigerian, Ethiopian, or Sudanese.
“Cabrini Green.”
The driver’s eyebrows raised a moment. He hesitated, then said, “All right then. Know just wheres it is. My youngest daughter and her kids lives right there.”
Clarence remembered a certain texture to the air at Cabrini Green. After all these years it was still there, palpable. It felt like a steel mill on a hot day and left a sulfur aftertaste.
The sagging tenements leaned like drunkards. Here in the “jets” was a higher infant mortality rate than in much of the Third World. Here televisions were often on twenty-four hours a day to fool prowlers into thinking someone was up, and to fool residents into thinking their lives had purpose. Many of the apartments didn’t have curtains, half the appliances didn’t work, cabinets were made of rusted sheet metal, sometimes riddled with bullet holes. Every back walkway smelled of urine. Daley’s dilapidated plantations hadn’t changed that much in all these years. For the most part, they’d just gotten worse.
The projects were their own world, with their own rules of conduct. Many of the children here had never traveled more than a half mile beyond. Some people were born, lived, and died in the projects, having never seen the parts of Chicago in the movies.
Clarence stayed up late with Franky, outlining some of the things he wanted to do the next day, what kinds of people he’d like to interview. Franky showed him to a bedroom. It smelled stale. The noise kept him up till three o’clock in the morning. At four he woke up to the sound of two gunshots. Just before five he woke up again to yelling and screaming. He suspected Franky and his family slept right through it all.
“We got smash ’n grabs goin’ on all the time,” Franky told Clarence. “Bangers jump a car at a stoplight, break out the windows with a baseball bat, and grabs jewelry right off the driver.”
“What’s it like for the kids nowadays?” Clarence asked, remembering his own childhood here.
“All the little brothas has a couple a.k.a.s. They never gives their real names to cops or strangers. The kids go down to the stadium, and the attendants keep them away. They say no neighborhood children allowed, to keep out the Horner kids right next door. Cousin Albert, he still at Horner, you know? You say you goin’ there tomorrow? You look him up. Ol’ Albert Lyin’stein, ’member how we called him that? Ax him about it. Just ax him. Says the kids all make money by guardin’ cars at the stadium. Rich folks pays ’em to not smash their cars. Told me his own boys was paid five bucks to do the chicken wing.”
Clarence recalled the chicken wing well and the memory knotted his stomach. Black boys would mimic a squawking chicken, and a white man would laugh at the frenzied dance and give them a few dollars. He felt his temperature rise. He’d never done the chicken wing. Even as a child, he would have died first.
“Things have changed, Cuz,” Franky said. “In the ol’ days everybody was mad at injustice. Thought they could do something about it, make the system work. Not any more. People’s given up. Now they just looks out for themselves, gets the next paycheck, the next hit.”
“What’s the attitude toward cops?”
“The man? Yesterday some dumb cop left his patrol car for two minutes, and Swirl and Stumpy, they up on the third floor and drop a bowling ball right on it.” He laughed. “Best was last spring. Couple o�
�� brothas, Looney and Docta Doo, they push out an old refrigerator from the top floor. Landed three feet from a pig witch. Shoulda heard her scream!”
“She could have been killed.”
“So what? Brothas gettin’ killed all the time. Cops don’t care about us.”
“But they’re better than the criminals, aren’t they?”
Franky shrugged. “At least the criminals is our own.”
Clarence wrote it down in his notes. “Does that apply to drug dealers?”
“There’s a drug dealer, Bad Rod, he’s big in the Vice Lords. Smart dude. One of the papers, they interviewed him, and the brotha say he recruits kids to sell just to get ’em enough green to give ’em a chance to be doctors and lawyers if that’s what they wants. Dealers ain’t so bad, not all of ’em.”
“Yeah, right. And Al Capone did soup lines. What a humanitarian. You prey off people, then turn around and make yourself out to be a hero. Who’s this pusher making a doctor and a lawyer? All he’s doing is making drug addicts and gangsters that’ll kill or die or go to jail before they can vote.”
Franky gave him a look that said, Forgettin’ who you is, Cuz?
Clarence asked Franky about the justice system. He said the courts were just a white good ol’ boys club, with all the players—from prosecutors to public defenders to judges—their own white-collar gang, getting in their beatings on black folk by sending them off to jail.
“I got a neighbor,” Franky said, “who tells his kids, ‘Someday we be outta here. You has a nice backyard and your own garden and a good life and stuff.’ I tells him quit lyin’ to his kids.”
“Lyin?” Clarence said. “They finish school, work hard, save up their money, and they can do it. That’s not a lie.”
Franky looked at him as though he just didn’t get it.
“Mrs. Stout,” Franky called out to an elderly lady walking their direction. “Sup? Hey you hear about ol’ Mrs. Watson in 395?” He pointed down the way.
“No. What about her?” The woman’s face fell limp.
“Died last night.”
The old woman shook her head. “Who shot her?”
“Wasn’t shot. Woman was eighty-five years old. You know. Jus’ died in her sleep, that’s all.”
“That’s what I hope happens to me. Don’t want to get shot.”
In the afternoon Clarence interviewed two gang members, then asked Franky to drive him through the projects and point out some highlights. As they drove, he noticed two boys no more than fourteen cross their arms, close their fists, and throw the dramatic sign of the Black Gangster Disciples. Everywhere Clarence looked, he saw baseball caps of various pro teams from around the country.
“What’s with the L.A. Kings hat?” Clarence asked Franky.
“Kings stands for ‘Kill Inglewood Nasty Gangsters.’”
“How about that one, the Orlando Magic?”
“You know the Maniac Latin Disciples? Magic stands for Maniacs And Gangsters In Chicago.” They drove a little farther.
“What about UNLV over there? Don’t suppose it means University of Nevada Las Vegas?”
“Have to read it backwards, VLNU. Vice Lords Nation United.”
Clarence stopped and interviewed a Black Gangster Disciple named Moff, who bragged his set was the biggest and toughest, that their dominion went far and wide. His brothers Sogs and Mile proudly showed Clarence their crossed pitchfork tattoos and six point Star of David, which he’d seen spray painted all over the city on public buildings and El platforms.
“Is that a sign of support for Jews?” Clarence said, unable to resist asking.
“Whatchu sayin’ man?” Moff’s dis-detector went off.
“That’s the star of David,” Clarence said. “It’s a Jewish sign.”
“No way, joker. That be the Gangster Disciple sign. We don’t let no Jew boy steal it.”
Clarence moved on, noting sides of buildings that looked as if they’d been strafed.
“Them drive bys can be messy,” Franky said. “Sorry about Dani,” he added, catching himself. “Thought maybe things was different out in Oregon.”
“I guess people are the same wherever you go,” Clarence said.
They got back in Franky’s old car and drove toward the far edge of the development. Clarence recognized some old landmarks and suddenly started feeling clammy.
“Turn around,” Clarence said.
“There’s more I wants to show you,” Franky said.
“No. Turn around. Now.”
This part of Cabrini Green dug up a memory he was determined to keep buried.
Clarence flew out of O’Hare a day early, skipping his planned interviews at Henry Horner. After Cabrini Green, he’d had enough.
The images of the projects haunted him. Not so much the physical conditions—by American standards they were very poor, but by some Third World standards they were enviable. What troubled him most were the hurting people, most of them living for the moment and not for the future because the future held no hope or promise. One of the few oases in the desert were the students from nearby Moody Bible Institute. Led by a black student who’d once been a gangbanger in the Green, they had started Bible studies and provided tutoring. They brought over many children from Cabrini Green to their campus athletic facilities. Still, as much as he tried to focus on the hopeful aspects, an overall sense of despair overwhelmed him.
The hotel’s opulence had accentuated the contrast between the two Americas. But it wasn’t the gold faucets that plagued him. The image he couldn’t shake was the man in the Ritz restroom.
Why did they have him there? Did the hotel get some percentage from his tips? Would any white man do this job? Clarence remembered counting twelve shoeshine men once in the Detroit airport. All twelve were black. He tried to imagine an elderly white man passing out towels in the Chicago Ritz restroom. He couldn’t.
Handing out towels served no useful purpose. What was the old man’s real job? To serve as a symbol of black inferiority? Were wealthy whites supposed to put a dollar in the plate to absolve themselves of guilt? To do an act of kindness to the man’s race? Was it like those who don’t need to think about the poor at Christmas once they drop two quarters in the pot of a Salvation Army bell ringer?
Clarence still couldn’t shake the feeling he’d sensed in that old black man in the starched white smock and straight-backed chair. The feeling of humiliation. The feeling of shame.
GC was born Raymond Taylor. He’d been dubbed Gangster Cool as a fifteen-year-old and had always treasured the name change as his defining moment. Where else in the universe but in a gang could you be given a new name, and such a powerful one? He was determined to live up to it.
His relationship with his mother had changed along with his name. She opposed his lifestyle but loved him and hoped for his reform. He and Mama had resorted to hard stares at each other. GC had what was known on the streets as a thousand-yard stare, the kind that others can’t hold. The only person who could ever hold his stare was Mama, and now she’d given up.
She’d been so close to losing him she didn’t deny him much now. But one thing she could never forgive him for was what made her move to Portland from L.A. Her older son, Jesse, had become a Christian five years ago. He’d opted out of the gangs—no easy task. He was going to the university, active at church, leading Bible studies in the neighborhood, being a big brother to some of the boys without fathers. One night the Bloods had come for GC and shot up the house. GC didn’t get hurt— he wasn’t even home—but Jesse had been killed. Despite his mother’s pleadings, GC had gone after the Bloods, killing the sixteen-year-old triggerman in Jesse’s death, though the cops could never prove it. Meanwhile his mama’s life got sucked out of her. Having lost Jesse to death and Raymond to the gangs, she’d begun to shrink from human touch. Just recently she’d said to Pastor Clancy, “I don’t worry so much about the prison. I jus’ worry about the cemetery.”
GC’s room was a command post. One poster s
aid “Almighty Crips.” Next to it was an eight-by-ten photo from Lloyd Center Glamour Shots. He and his homeboys posed in full flag, blue to the baddest. They held guns, aimed at each other. The photographer had said ‘no way’ when they pulled out the hardware, but when they pointed them at him, he relented and took the pictures. One guy, Ace, sat in a wheelchair. He’d been gunned down by Bloods but still hung with the group. A soldier. Righteous.
He looked at two other pictures of homies, both of these laid out at their funerals. He didn’t have pictures like that of some of his closest homies; you take a shotgun to the head and it’s a closed casket. It angered him. But he consoled himself that in the retaliation, with a few shots to the face at point-blank range, he’d helped make sure those dead slobs couldn’t have open caskets either.
His left shoulder ached a little. Maybe he still had a bullet in there. He’d been shot in five different battles, taken a total of eight or nine bullets. Once an X ray showed a bullet he didn’t know was there. He took pride in that.
His mama had moved him up here from L.A. because Portland was safe. In L.A. she’d seen house after house, neighborhood after neighborhood overrun by Crips, gobbled up like a plague. She called it the blue plague and the red plague. The only L.A. she knew was a war zone. It would have been safer living in Beirut. Portland seemed her last chance. Her son’s last chance. But he’d gone from an average gangster there to big fish in a small pond here. The highest he’d gotten there was assistant to the minister of defense. Here he was a general from day one. He’d tell his homeboys stories of glory, stories about the Crip sets, the Park Village Compton Crips, Nine Deuce Hoover, Main Street Crips, Sho-line Crips, and the Eight Treys, with whom his Rollin’ 60s Crips were mortal enemies.
GC spent jail time in L..A.., where senior gangsters served as tutors. He’d done a little jail time in Portland too, the perfect place to recruit and scope out gang members. Gang life never stopped in jail. Any kid who wasn’t in a gang prior to jail became part of one in jail, ethnic gangs defending themselves against each other. Portland was a land of opportunity for dope peddlers and gangs. The soldiers had lots of experience against L.A. cops, the enemy’s best troops. Portland was L.A. waiting to happen all over again.
