Boys Enter the House

by David Nelson

  “Pick one out,” Billy told her.

  Without much thought, she grabbed a little turquoise ring that fit best on her middle finger instead. Unofficially, it became her engagement ring.

  MaryJane still wears it to this day.

  Lisa Heath had seen Dale Landingin roving around Uptown before she met him and his friend, Donnie Belle, for real. “They used to bounce around with their jeans on and no shirt in the summertime,” Lisa said. “They were like rock ’n’ roll dudes and all the girls loved them.”

  Crowds of teenagers would often gather at a spot known as “the Hill,” officially known as Cricket Hill in between Montrose Beach and Montrose Harbor. Among clouds of weed and in between swigs of beer, cars would often drag race through the parking lots. Sometimes she’d catch a glimpse of the black-haired boy named Dale, juxtaposed with the blond hair of his friend Donnie.

  At the Hill, Lisa smoked her first joint and drank her first beer. She was only twelve or thirteen, though everywhere she went, people thought she was older. “I remember the day the age for legal drinking went from eighteen to twenty-one,” Lisa said. “I was sitting in a bar when it came on the news, and the bartender looked over to me and said, ‘You are twenty-one, aren’t you?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, of course!’ And I was thirteen.”

  When she wasn’t hanging out at the Hill, Lisa often saw Donny and Dale zinging up and down the streets on their bikes near where she lived in a HUD high-rise at the corner of Marine Drive and Carmen Avenue.

  By then, after his divorce, Dale’s father was living a few buildings down on Carmen. Lisa looked across the street one day to see Dale and Donnie ringing the bell to get inside to see Francisco.

  Lisa moved quickly, crossing the street and walking right into the foyer, pretending she was there to visit a friend she knew inside.

  With their rings going unanswered, Dale and Donnie were about to head out when Lisa struck up a conversation. Before long, Donnie and Dale invited Lisa to join them at a party they were going to.

  Lisa agreed.

  “[We] turned around and walked out, and by the time we were to the corner, Donnie had his arm slung around my shoulder, and we were happily on our way to the train to go party,” she said.

  Perhaps because of their shared environment, their same experiences, Lisa slipped into an easy friendship with the boys. Living in Uptown, she’d grown up as a tomboy, hardened by the difficulties of the street and her life at home. She’d never known her biological father, though her mother did point him out from time to time, when they passed him on Argyle as he rolled past in a wheelchair. Lisa’s father had been injured during a war—which one, she wasn’t sure—and had a metal plate in his head that often needed draining of fluids. Once, when it wasn’t drained properly, her father had gotten gangrene in both of his legs, which had needed to be amputated.

  Instead, the only male figure in her life was her step-grandfather, himself a quadriplegic as a result of a past car accident. Rather than commit him to a nursing home, her grandmother had decided to care for him herself. As a result, Lisa was not allowed to bring over friends or boyfriends, so she spent most of her time out in the neighborhood.

  Like her new friend Dale, she found trouble easily. Although she was a clever kid with high test scores, she often cut class at lunchtime. When the principal of the Catholic school, a nun, told Lisa they would not be “hosting her” for eighth grade the following year, they gave her an envelope with the seventy-five-dollar registration fee to return to her mother. Lisa pocketed the cash.

  Once, after she was arrested on the train for drunk and disorderly conduct, her mother had refused to bail her out. “Take her,” her mother had told the cops. “Teach her a lesson.”

  As a result, she’d spent the night at the Audy Home, a juvenile detention facility, where she befriended a Latin Queen. Through their conversation, Lisa somehow let on to where she lived in Uptown, and sometime after they had both been released from Audy Home, the Latin Queen robbed the family’s Marine Drive apartment.

  Although they didn’t own much of any value, Lisa was tenacious, as tough as any boy facing off against another gang or rival. She tracked down her family’s belongings to a home nearby and retrieved them, one by one, without a fight.

  Lisa had frequent encounters with the gangs—sometimes hanging out with the Thorndale Jag Offs or the Simon City Royals, one of whom she’d had a crush on before his death at a young age.

  And so, Lisa was an equal to Donnie and Dale. Her entire life had been a sort of audition to get into their graces, and now they were opening the door to one long party that would last an entire summer.

  There were no more distractions, no more obstacles ahead for Greg Godzik and Judy Patterson. No ex-boyfriends standing in the doorway, waiting to wedge themselves between them. Their parents approved, even if Judy’s German, iron-willed grandmother did not. They were even attending Taft High School together, Judy as a sophomore and Greg as a senior.

  “We knew each other forever,” she said. “We grew up in the same neighborhood, we did the same things. And so then just came our time.”

  Greg was easygoing, animated, and sweet. “He always wanted to be active and do things,” Judy said. “He loved to laugh.”

  She remembered riding in Greg’s ’66 Pontiac, a rusted heap that he had bought cheaply but adored trying to fix up. In the backseat one day was another schoolmate who had a knack for making people laugh. Through his laughter, Greg could hardly keep the car on the road as their passenger cracked wise from the back, and Judy white-knuckled it in the front.

  “When you’re young, you always want to be moving … and doing crazy things you shouldn’t be doing,” Judy said.

  Around Thanksgiving that year, Greg and Judy found themselves again in the TV room upstairs in the Patterson house. As they sat together, Greg and Judy started talking about ear piercings, at the time becoming more common for young men, something edgy and bold. Greg turned to Judy and asked if she would pierce his ear.

  Judy agreed and quickly retrieved some ice, a washcloth, and a sewing needle. Admittedly, she didn’t quite know what she was doing, but started first by holding the ice to numb Greg’s left ear. When she figured he was ready, she took the needle and poked it through his lobe.

  Greg recoiled in pain, then got up from the couch, pacing the hallway as his earlobe seared. She told him they’d need to put something in the piercing soon, to keep it open. They chose a set of silver star earrings, which he wore to school the next day.

  “What ear is that?” one of Greg’s friends asked after he’d shown it off to them.

  Greg and Judy exchanged glances, confused.

  The friend explained that some gay men wore earrings in a specific ear, while heterosexual men made sure to pierce the other side.

  Greg and Judy knew nothing about this. Neither did they know the recommended use of a potato to brace the ear from behind during piercing. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” Judy said.

  Nevertheless, over the last few weeks of 1976, the silver star earring became a trademark look for Greg Godzik, glinting as they walked hand in hand through the hallways of Taft High. During those weeks, too, Greg and Judy’s relationship deepened. They made frequent plans and started saying “I love you” to one another. They exchanged school IDs as a gesture of teenage devotion. Judy keeps Greg’s ID in her purse to this day.

  As the holidays approached, they looked for more moments alone. On a chilly evening, they managed to find a rare moment where the Godzik home was empty. Greg’s older sister was off with her boyfriend, and his mother and father were Christmas shopping.

  Together, Judy and Greg crept downstairs to his bedroom in the basement where he kept piranhas in a big tank next to his bed. That night, Judy and Greg made love for the first time.

  And for a while, lying there in the glow of Greg’s aquarium with the piranhas floating just a few feet away, it truly might have seemed like nothing and nobody could stop them. As 19
76 ticked away toward 1977, it seemed to Judy and Greg that everything was going to be all right.

  For MaryJane and Billy Kindred, the first holiday season they spent together was also a crescendo in their relationship. Sometime around Christmas, Billy had gone down to Ohio to visit his mother and siblings. Unbeknownst to MaryJane, who’d remained up in Chicago with her own family, he excitedly told his mother and sisters that he’d met a nice girl he wanted to marry as soon as possible.

  The family was happy for Billy, happy that something was finally giving his life some meaning after having run such a rough course up to that point.

  Before the year was out, he returned to Chicago to reunite with MaryJane.

  On New Year’s Day, without any place to be except inside from the cold, Billy and MaryJane got a room together at the Diversey Arms Hotel. They spent the afternoon eating, drinking, and talking together about whatever came to mind. Both of them were visibly nervous—not just because they were alone together in a hotel room, but because they still genuinely felt that way about one another.

  As the afternoon progressed, MaryJane and Billy got into bed, and for the first time, they slept together.

  By then, they’d been together for close to six months. It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been any chemistry between them, or that they hadn’t wanted to have sex. The moment had simply never presented itself in the right way.

  Beyond that, Billy never pushed her, though he’d definitely talked about it. It was clear that their presence in each other’s lives was about more than just a physical connection; they were trying to build something together. Those scarce moments together alone in the hotel room offered a glimpse of the life they’d fantasized about.

  “It was a euphoric moment,” MaryJane said of her first time. “It wasn’t just two kids having sex. It was something else.”

  As they lay there, holding each other, quiet tears began to run down Billy’s face. When MaryJane pressed him about it, Billy expressed regret, not for what they’d just done but rather for the path his life had taken up until then. “He told me he’d made mistakes,” MaryJane said. “He’d wished he’d had a better life.”

  Billy never told MaryJane much about his time in jail or what had put him there. She knew he’d gotten himself in trouble here and there over the years, but to what extent she didn’t know. Boys in the neighborhoods—no matter if they’d grown up in Uptown or in Albany Park where MaryJane had lived—were always bumping up against other boys or their parents or even the police.

  And she didn’t care. The boy next to her in bed was good enough for her, even if he didn’t think himself to be. He was afraid of losing her, afraid that one day she might suddenly think there was something better out there for her, or that he was preventing her own life from moving forward in a way that gave her meaning and joy. But the truth was, Billy gave her both.

  MaryJane did her best to comfort Billy. In the dim hotel room, he was more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him. He’d never shed tears in front of her before. Out on the streets, in the neighborhood he’d grown up in, he’d been tough and in control, not just in front of her but also in front of old friends from Kenmore Avenue where every day he’d battled against the weight of the world.

  He was so desperate for a break, for a light to shine on him and reveal a path he could take with MaryJane. Along that path there was a ring, a wedding, a house they could fill with children. Together they could be a family, this fantasy life suspended so briefly within the four walls of their hotel room.

  Later in the day, after she’d done her best to reassure Billy that nothing was going to change how she felt about him, they left the hotel to return home in the snow. Billy walked her to the bus stop, where he waited with her. When the bus arrived, they said good-bye and she rode north to home, leaving him behind.

  But even as the bus took her away, MaryJane had already begun to feel closer to Billy than she ever had before, more certain that this was the person she was supposed to be with. She was ready for what she thought would come next.

  Although his family had moved to Des Plaines from Chicago between his sophomore and junior years, Johnny Szyc quickly found a footing in his new home, where his passion for animals got him a job at Animal Kingdom, a pet shop on Lee Street. The store, which had another site on Milwaukee Avenue in the city, was often home to the famous Chelveston the Duck, from Ray Rayner’s children’s shows. Tina the Tiger, a local celebrity, was also in residence between the two shops, though there were many other big cats who passed through.

  “He used to get into the cage with a lion,” Patti said. “And my mom, she just absolutely hated it.”

  At Maine West High School, where he began his junior year in the fall of ’73, Johnny joined the bowling and film clubs, and even managed to make new friends, though many of them were older students who had already graduated. “Somehow he just came into our group,” said Mark Johnson, who had graduated from Maine West in 1971. “He just appeared.”

  The group itself had formed in the early 1970s at Maine West, cobbled together from students that the rest of the school population had looked down upon. “We all gravitated towards each other because everybody else at school spit on us,” Lynn Meadows said. “So we just sort of formed our own clique.”

  Theater nerds, bookworms, teachers’ pets—they were all part of the crew. But even though they weren’t considered the “top tier” of high school society, they still made their way into social events. Mark remembered one party at a friend’s house spilling out into the lawns or the streets.

  Sometimes they found themselves hanging out at the forest preserves, hanging out on benches, sharing a joint, drinking beer, or giggling with one another as one of the boys stalked off into the trees, sometimes with another boy in tow.

  Neither Lynn nor Mark remember their friend John ever smoking a joint, and rarely did he ever drink. “He was just a sweetheart,” Mark said. “He always had a smile. He was never down about anything.… I never saw him without a smile.”

  As John’s personality solidified his place in Des Plaines, his friendships grew. He was well liked by everyone who encountered him.

  His senior year arrived. As he purchased a class ring centered with a blue gem and inscribed with his initials, John had found a good group of friends where he was safe to be himself. In fact, they loved him for who he was.

  As that final year at Maine West came into view, he took the opportunity to ask his friend Lynn Meadows to go to prom with him.

  She said yes.

  The first night Lisa Heath hung out with Dale Landingin and Donnie Belle, they partied hard. The two boys she had met only a few hours prior had brought her to a coach house somewhere in the New Town neighborhood, where all sorts of other people had gathered to drink or consume drugs.

  There was Ed, an older man who seemed like the “boss of the house,” and then there was Stacy and her handsome brother Gilbert, who supplied the drugs. Another Eddie of Mexican descent rented a room in the house where he came home each day after his job at the hospital. A revolving door of teenagers and young people filled the house daily. “It was party central,” as Lisa described it. “Like the true definition of the word.”

  But for Lisa, there was also Donnie Belle. Gorgeous, blond-haired, blue-eyed Donnie Belle, whom she’d spied in Uptown riding his bike, shirtless, through the summer air. “All of his attention was on me,” Lisa said, “and vice versa.”

  It wasn’t that she wasn’t attracted to Dale. But as they arrived at the party, it was clear Dale was there for someone else: a new girlfriend he’d met that year at a concert at the Aragon.

  That was the first night of many spent at the coach house in New Town. Even though she was only thirteen, she looked older than her age, and even so, it was the ’70s. No one blinked an eye as Lisa joined the other partiers snorting or mixing other drugs in with their marijuana. At some point, Lisa remembered, she was high on some drug as Gilbert chased her all around the house, begging h
er for a kiss.

  Donnie, who’d just arrived, got her out of the house when he realized she’d had too much. At another house, Donnie made her eat bread and drink milk to try and get the drugs out of her system. “I was just totally like floating and kind of incoherent,” she recalled.

  During the days, in between parties, she often found herself spending time at the house. Oftentimes, Ed, the head of the house, would give her a sheet of acid and send her out to sell it. “I would carry them right on my belt across my stomach when I went out and about,” she said.

  The other Eddie gave Lisa driving lessons in his stick shift. After one lesson, Lisa found herself up in Eddie’s room when she noticed, stuck to the mirror on his dresser, three Polaroids that he had taken of her. “He liked me a lot, let’s put it that way.”

  Lisa had assumed he was homosexual, given the reputation of the neighborhood as a growing gay enclave. Most likely, of course, the man was not a homosexual but simply attracted to underage boys and girls. In New Town these non-heteronormative concepts sometimes coexisted side by side, often deepening and reinforcing society’s unfortunate link between the two. “Even as far back as then, it was known that this was the gay part of town,” Lisa explained.

  Donnie and Dale seemed unbothered by it, though Dale was often in and out of the house. Later on, after everything else that would happen had happened, Lisa would put everything together. “I realized then, well, obviously that’s what he must have been doing,” she said. “He was out hustling guys.” How far he went, she didn’t know exactly, though she believes he was making himself “available to some degree.”

  In the area, it wasn’t unusual. Many boys of many ages found themselves bargaining with older gentlemen who swung by in their sedans, sometimes wearing hats tilted low to hide their faces, hoping for a quick blowjob or a handjob before heading home to their families. There was money to be made in New Town for a young man, especially one as handsome and slender as Dale Landingin.