Lake Effect

by Rich Cohen

  The basement was standard issue: damp, spooky, pachinko machine, board games (Risk, Pit, Sorry), washer-dryer. Reaching behind the dryer, Jake retrieved an unlabeled bottle filled with murky yellow liquid. He unscrewed the cap, breathed in the fumes, and grimaced. He took a deep breath, as if he were about to dive into cold water, and drank. He wiped his mouth on his forearm and handed the bottle to Jamie, who took a slug and passed the bottle to Tom, who said, “No fucking way,” and passed the bottle to me. The whiskey had a rotten smell that I recognized from car trips through Gary, Indiana.

  Jamie said, “Hey, Richie, whatever you want to do, that’s cool.”

  I closed my eyes and took a swallow. It was sharp and clear and I could feel it burn going down. I imagined it glowing in my stomach. When I passed the bottle to Jake, he said, “One’s enough.” Jamie took the bottle, drank, handed it to me. I drank and handed it to Jamie. He drank. I took the bottle back and downed a big slug.

  Jamie said, “Go easy.”

  He balanced the bottle on his leg. I grabbed it away and started to drink. Jamie grabbed me, saying, “Enough.” He pulled the bottle out of my hand and smiled and said, “Jeez, you want to go blind?”

  In my memory, the next several hours are as ragged and gap-filled as a home movie shot on super eight: I am in a kitchen, talking to a girl, who holds my hand and says, “Go on, please go on”; I am on a weedy lawn, looking at the stars, tears running down my face, saying, “None of it means anything”; I am in a parking lot, shoving a kid, throwing a punch, and getting knocked down; I am on a public beach, kids gathered around a bonfire, which sends smoke into the sky; I am wading into water so cold I cannot feel my feet; I am rolling in the sand. And all the while I am aware of Jamie, never more than a few feet away, watching me. Though I am stupid and helpless, he keeps me close and protects me from the bad things that can happen to a young kid drunk on moonshine.

  Jamie carried me up the steps to the parking lot and gently laid me in the backseat of Ronnie’s car. In those days, Ronnie was mostly interested in driving fast. He often used the term red-line. “I red-lined this baby at one-twenty-five.” At the same time, he was petrified of getting a ticket or of any other run-in with the cops, who he feared would abuse him as he had been abused on the schoolyard. So, believing a patrol car hid on every side street, Ronnie would gun his car up to a hundred miles an hour and then brake down to thirty-five in time for the intersection. That night, hanging out the window, my head rattled around like a Ping-Pong ball. When we reached Jamie’s house, I crawled out of the car and puked in the bushes. Jamie took me behind the garage and stood me against a tree and took off my clothes. When I opened my eyes, I saw Jamie ten feet away, aiming a hose at me. The water came in a cold blast and I hugged myself and coughed and shouted, “I am not an animal!”

  Jamie dried me with towels. “My mom and Violet are asleep,” he said. “So be quiet as you walk through the kitchen.” When he opened the door, I ran naked through the house, threw open the door to his room, and dove into his bed. Even before I landed, I was fast asleep.

  When I opened my eyes, it was eleven in the morning, the sun was shining, the windows were open, and a warm breeze carried the smell of cut grass. I was a seventeen-year-old kid the morning after his first drunk, and I felt fantastic.

  I asked Jamie for my clothes.

  “I put them in a bag,” he said, “and threw them very far away.”

  “Even my shoes?”

  “Especially your shoes.”

  Jamie gave me a shirt and a pair of shorts and we walked to town. The doors of the stores were open and the merchants stood in the sun. We ducked into Ray’s Sport Shop, which had been failing since Ray sold out. The new owner, Lee Ho, a Korean in his forties, was extremely happy to see us. As we walked the aisles, Lee pushed his glasses up his nose and, in a singsong voice, said, “Best nylon, two-ply,” or “Cross training, training two sport,” or “Racket wins while you enjoy tennis.”

  I picked out a shirt, a bathing suit, and shoes. I asked Lee to send the bill to my parents, a service performed by every store in Glencoe, making life, for the kids of town, the very best dream of communism.

  As Lee put my shorts in a bag, he said, “OK, do you want to wear your old shoes or your new ones?”

  I said, “I have no old shoes.”

  Lee tossed his head back, burst out laughing, and through his laughter shouted, “No shoes? You really need new shoes!”

  Jamie and I started laughing, and we were still laughing as we stumbled out onto the warm sidewalks of town. And all at once, I realized this was a windy June morning, the first day of vacation, the entire summer before me, a new country waiting to be explored.

  Jamie said, “Let’s go to the beach.”

  So we turned onto Hazel Avenue and started east, the lake waiting at the end of the road. I thanked Jamie for taking care of me the night before and told him I was embarrassed about how I acted. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s these towns. There’s nothing to do so you go and get blind drunk and then suffer the remorse. No. There is only one way for us. As soon as I get the Mustang running, we’re heading down to the city. That’s the place. That is where it will all happen. In the city.”

  Of course, we could get a lift into the city from Ronnie, but that would mean having Ronnie along with us, and in that case we would be better off in the suburbs where the inanity of Ronnie at least had its proper context. It was not just me who believed that, in a showdown with Ronnie, Chicago would be in some way diminished. So we waited, kicked around, followed my father through the backyard, gleaning his routine for some pearl of wisdom— “Remember, boys, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there”—as each night Jamie and Tom, whispering and passing tools and opening beers and stepping into the street to watch the moon set over the low roofs of town, worked on the car, bringing it around, piece by piece, gear by gear, like a great holy ark that would carry us to another world. “Look at her,” Tom would say. “I can see my face in the fender, my god-damned beautiful face.”

  One afternoon, as I was standing in my driveway, throwing a tennis ball at the garage, practicing the many trick pitches that my father had taught me (screwball, knuckler), I heard what sounded like a gunshot followed by laughter and a beautiful hum. When I turned around, Jamie and Tom, side by side in the Mustang, were dazzling under the overhanging trees. Across the street, an old man was watering his yard. In the spray, I could see a thousand tiny rainbows. When the Mustang pulled up, I could hear, blasting from the speakers, the opening words of “Let’s Live for Today.” When I think of all the trouble people seem to find, and how they’re in a hurry to complicate their minds . . .

  Tom turned it up and shouted, “I even got the fucking tape deck to work.”

  Inside, the car was like a cockpit, the low-slung driver’s seat surrounded by dials and warning lights. Behind the stick shift, Jamie had installed a phone, an old piece of junk found in his garage. It connected to nothing. At stop-lights, if he pulled alongside a car full of girls, he would hold the phone to his ear and take up a conversation left off at the last stoplight, a never-ending argument with his agent. “No more openings,” he would shout. “I’m only human.”

  Jamie looked at me, alone in my driveway, and said, “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “The city.”

  I ran inside, changed my shirt, pulled on a pair of clean pants, ran some water though my hair, looked in the mirror—not bad—told my mother I was going to Jamie’s house . . .

  “When will you be back, honey?”

  “I’m sleeping over.”

  . . . ran outside, climbed into the backseat, and said, “Onward.”

  Jamie threw the car into drive, scooted past Ronnie’s house—I could see him in the window, watching with his sad, sleepy eyes—and then we rolled through town. We went by Ray’s Sport Shop and Harry’s Delicatessen. There was a line outside Sloppy Ed’s, the girls in cons
tellations, moving through their galaxies. To the kids of town, Chicago was a place seen two or three times a year from the window of a Town Car or from inside a restaurant; now here we were, lighting out on our own. Under my breath, I said, “Going to the city. Got business in the city.”

  We followed Green Bay Road to Sunset Ridge, which took us through the lagoons of the Forest Preserve and then onto the Edens Expressway. With the shudder and pace of the passing cars, I at once felt I had slipped the bonds into another world. To this day, I feel the same on an airplane bound for a foreign country. I am on the ground in New York but, surrounded by accents and a mood of excitement, I’m already on the far side of the ocean. I never saw Jamie look in the rearview mirror or check his blind spot or look in the side mirrors, and still he seemed to know just where we were on the highway. He dodged the slower traffic like it was standing still.

  We sang along with the radio and talked about the girls in school and the difference between the juniors and the sophomores; then about white women and black women and which is better in bed (Jamie said he definitely wanted to sleep with a woman of every race); and then the best kind of beer, Mickey’s or Point; then nuclear war and would it be better to be at the epicenter of the blast or out in the suburbs, where you would stumble around for a few days and then die. Jamie said he hoped to be vaporized and leave behind nothing but his shadow.

  About thirty minutes south of Glencoe, the trees along the road gave way to factory yards, billboards, and smokestacks. Jamie turned down the radio and there was only the sound of the wind. I looked at the passing neighborhoods—neon signs, pool halls, apartment houses, clothes strung over yards, fathers over barbecues, smoke mounting into the clear summer sky. I thought of the families sitting to dinner and wondered why I had been born where I was born and why my parents were my parents, and I was soon imagining the life I might have led in one of these town houses, the elevated train rattling past, the city at the end of every street.

  Up ahead the sun was going down and the skyline of the city looked like a paper cutout against pink marble. We got off the highway at Ohio Street and rolled by apartment houses and traffic lights to Michigan Avenue, gliding between the tall buildings, coasting along the canyon bottoms. Tom knew the name of each building; he pointed out the Playboy Club, roguish with its peaked cap; the Tribune Tower, a sandcastle at the mouth of the Chicago River, and the John Hancock Center, saying, “That’s the sixteenth biggest building in the world.” Tom already had that brand of pride characteristic of Chicago, a pride built on insecurity, a fear that people in the East are laughing at you. For this reason, anyone from Chicago can give you a tour organized around the phrase Biggest in the world.

  “See that fountain, Buckingham Fountain? Biggest in the world. Even bigger than the one they got over in England. See there, those stockyards? Biggest in the world. And it’s not even close. See that? It’s the Sears Tower, biggest building in the world.”

  Looking up to where the sky was still blue, I felt like a reef fish peering at the surface of the water.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “The South Side,” said Jamie. “The Checkerboard Lounge.”

  Everyone I knew was afraid of the South Side. The name itself was a curse, a slander; it struck fear in the heart of every kid from the northern suburbs. It had once been the home of our grandfathers, a haven for immigrants from Poland, Russia, and Greece. On weekend nights, the air had filled with fumes from their grills— souvlaki, bratwurst, sausage—and the streets had soaked up the warm midwestern rain. But drib by drab the sons of those immigrants had moved to the manicured pastures of Rogers Park or Bucktown, or even farther north to Winnetka, Evanston, Glencoe. And so the South Side had become a great American slum, a ramble of burned-out buildings and tenements, the hunting grounds of black and Puerto Rican street gangs, the Latin Kings, the El Rukins. It was where TV reporters filed their most troubling reports, where cops went for kickbacks. It was where you headed if you had nothing to lose, if things could get no worse, if you were out of ideas and did not mind being beaten or robbed or kidnapped or killed. It is where, on our first night in the city, Jamie had decided to take us.

  “Why?” asked Tom. “In the name of God, why?”

  Jamie parked on the shoulder of Michigan Avenue, put an arm around Tom, and explained how, on the South Side, we could mingle and carouse with the true aristocrats of the city, and also we would not be carded.

  “That’s your reason?” asked Tom.

  “That, and because we are going to hear the blues, and there is no place to hear the blues but on the South Side, and because there is really nothing closer to my heart tonight than the blues.”

  Before Tom could think of an answer, Jamie started the car and made the wide turn onto Lake Shore Drive. It was the moment when the chain catches hold on the roller coaster. Tom whispered, “Oh, fuck,” and the buildings flew past, following the curve of the shore. We ghosted by the Shedd Aquarium and Soldier Field and exited in one of those featureless neighborhoods just beyond the Loop, rocky little beaches and grimy apartment towers, and then we were into the real South Side, gliding down endless avenues of storefronts, boarded brick buildings, and check-cashing joints with one light burning.

  We turned onto 43rd Street and pulled up before a dilapidated house—the Checkerboard Lounge. If only I make it inside, I thought. There was a steel chain strung across the front door. A big man in a black coat looked me up and down and said, “Five bucks.” I handed over the money and stepped into a rank-smelling room just big enough for a stage, warped under weak lights, a few dozen chairs, and some long narrow linoleum-topped tables. The room was crowded with hipsters from another era, black men of the 1940s celebrating the end of the Second World War, in velvet pants and candy-colored jackets and wide-brimmed hats and, below the hats, smiles filled with gold teeth. The women wore jumpsuits and tottering-high heels. Walking to the bar, in groups of two or three, their asses swung like metronomes. They returned with glasses of syrupy red wine called Ripple and ice-chilled shots of Chivas Regal. There were a lot of beauty products in the air. If the storm fronts of perfume and cigarette smoke had met, it would surely have rained inside the club. Now and then, the men burst into laughter.

  “What are they laughing at?” I asked.

  “Us,” said Tom, who was making eye contact with a bus of a man with long Jheri Curls. On his right hand, he wore one of those rings which says a name (Terrence) and stretches across three knuckles and is just the best thing for fighting.

  “We’re not such a big noise that they need to talk about us,” said Jamie. “These men talk about rivers.”

  Jamie ordered three glasses of Ripple and three shots of Chivas. I swallowed a mouthful of Ripple. When it reached my knees, I was happy. I smiled at a woman and she smiled back. Tom rolled his eyes. Jamie said, “No, it’s OK. He’s just feeling it and there is nothing less real in feeling it than in not feeling it.”

  And then Jamie was feeling it too, and so was Tom, and a few of the fellows got on stage and picked up instruments and started to play. The singer sat on a stool, a big man in overalls. His voice was scratchy and his belly shook as he shouted, “Some folk built like this, some folk built like that, but the way I’m built, don’t ya call me fat, ’cause I’m built for comfort, baby, I ain’t built for speed.”

  When I went to the bathroom, I saw Jamie in a corner talking to a guy in a green suit. Jamie followed me into the toilet and said, “C’mon, we’re leaving.”

  “I just ordered another Chivas.”

  “Finish your Chivas and we’re gone. There’s a guitar player on the West Side, a place called Rosa’s, supposed to be the best guitar player in the city. His name is Melvin Taylor.”

  And then we were back on the road, rushing past row houses frozen in the moonlight. Jamie fooled with the radio, then shut it off. He spoke about the blues. He said the blues had come from the South, from farms and plantations where field hands strummed acoustic
guitars. He said the blues had followed the Mississippi River north, picking up the rhythm of the cities as it went. He said, “That is why, in the best songs, like ‘Bring It on Home,’ by Sonny Boy Williamson, you can hear the freight train and the highway.” He said the blues eventually reached Chicago, where Howlin’ Wolf and Johnny Shines worked as night watchmen in factories and added to the music the sound of the slaughter yards and the assembly lines. He said major innovations came in downtown clubs where it was too noisy to hear acoustic instruments, so the musicians plugged into speakers. He spoke specifically of Muddy Waters, who ran a Coke bottle up and down his guitar strings, and of Little Walter, who electrified his harmonica, giving it a lonely late-night sound. He told us the names of his favorite singers: Robert Nighthawk, Johnny Littlejohn, Lafayette Thomas, Hound Dog Taylor, Little Milton. When he stopped talking, we were in front of Rosa’s, a neon sign flickering in the window.

  Rosa’s was dank, a bar running down one side, a stage in back. Drinks were being served by a quarrelsome old lady with a shock of white hair. The place was empty, a few aficionados lazing in their cigarette smoke. Onstage Melvin Taylor was playing guitar with his band. He wore a beautiful shirt and dark blue pants, a hat pushed back on his head. On the guitar strings, his hands blurred like propellers. With each guitar burst, his eyes widened. His fineboned face opened and closed. He sang about drinking and chasing girls, being chased by girls, and satisfying many women at once. His music was like nothing I had ever heard—guitar solos cool and precise and running out like surf.

  We finished our beers and ordered more and then the music had us on our feet. Jamie threw an arm around me, the lights of the city spinning behind him like a trick in an old movie. His breath was hot and beery. He said, “Check out the bass player, the ass on him. He’s got big pants not as a statement of fashion, you understand, but because those are the only pants that can handle that tremendous ass—an ass handed down from generation to generation—and it is awesome and majestic, like a state flower, by which I mean a symbol of something else, a whole republic of guys out playing the blues in bars.” Then he said, “What would Chicago be like without black people? A wasteland. And to me that big ass is a symbol of this other city thirty miles from home, but we never see it, and that is something I will drink to.”