by Colin Asher
My very first memory, Gerson told Nelson, is of camels. I saw them in Jerusalem, and I saw men wearing turbans there as well. I remember the Great Chicago Fire too. It was October 1871, and I had just returned to the Black Oak farm with my family. I was very young, but I can still recall the way the horizon turned red after the sunset. The fire burned for days, and when it was extinguished, Chicago was gone.
I helped build the World’s Columbian Exposition, Gerson said, and when it opened I walked the Midway until I reached the Street in Cairo so I could watch Little Egypt perform. She went on stage wearing a skirt and leggings, but not much of a top. She had a thin scarf, and she wrapped it around her body, and then unwrapped it. She rocked her hips and a band stomped. It was called a belly dance.
I found work as a machinist when the Exposition ended, Gerson said, and afterward I rarely saw the city at night. There were a few exceptions though. Once, I visited the Columbia Ballroom on North Clark Street and saw McGuire’s Ice Cream Kings. They wore white suits on stage, and women danced the speedy three-step while they played. Another time, I visited a saloon owned by Heinie Kabibbler. I ordered a drink, the bartender handed me a mug, and I raised it to my lips. A thin vertical slit had been cut into the glass, but I didn’t notice, so beer poured down the front of my shirt when I took a sip.
Baseball commanded Nelson’s attention the following year. The game was life in Park Manor then, and the White Sox were the gods who determined its course. The team was winding its way toward the World Series, and everyone said they couldn’t be stopped. After all, they were tougher than ordinary men, and quicker, smarter, and cagier.
Every boy in the neighborhood identified himself with one of the team’s players. Some favored the college boys on the White Sox roster—Eddie Collins, and Red Faber. Others looked up to veterans like Eddie Cicotte, and Shoeless Joe Jackson—men who returned to the ballpark year after year, the way working stiffs reported to factory jobs. But Nelson idolized a wild character named Charles August “Swede” Risberg.
The Swede was a thin Californian with a long face and a permanent scowl. He played shortstop and he could throw, but he was better known for the persona he cultivated off the field. He claimed that he had been kicked out of third grade, and he drank, fought, and womanized. He told reporters he didn’t have a care in the world, and they believed him—at least enough to print his claims. “He would gleefully toss up his chances for fame and lucre and take the first train back to the Pacific Coast,” one wrote, “where he knows everybody and is known by everybody.”
Nelson carried a Swede Risberg bat around Park Manor that summer, and when he wanted to broadcast his casual attitude toward life, he leaned on it heavily. He began telling people to call him Swede, and he taught himself to walk pigeon-toed, because that was the way Risberg walked.
Nelson’s best friend at the time was Jake Somerhaus—a baseball prodigy who carried a clay pipe that he packed with tobacco scrounged from discarded cigarettes. He and Nelson prowled the freight tracks together on the weekends and scavenged in the trash heap behind White City Casino. They pitched baseball cards for a while as well, and then they discovered brewery trucks.
The trucks passed through Park Manor regularly, loaded with barrels of trub—a thick, treacly, alcoholic mixture of dead yeast and fermented malt. They were headed toward the stockyards on the West Side, where their cargo would become slop for pigs, and as they bounced along the neighborhood’s roads, the trub sloshed around, spilled, and poured into the street.
Every time the boys spotted a truck, they began jogging. When they closed in on their target, they extended their arms and used empty cans to catch some of the trub before it reached the pavement. Then they returned to the sidewalk and drank—swallowing, and retching, until their throats were numb and their eyelids heavy.
They enjoyed their buzz, and then they left Park Manor and visited the printing room of the Saturday Blade. One of Gerson’s brothers worked on the presses, and every week he gave Nelson a stack of papers to sell.
The Blade was a five-cent broadsheet that called itself “America’s Greatest Weekly” and sold hundreds of thousands of copies with every print run. A pair of American flags graced its cover, and a three-color comic dominated the center of the front page. The paper had a respectable veneer and a populist sensibility, but its DNA was all tabloid and its headlines screamed. MAN SELLS WIFE, THEN SHOOTS BUYER, they announced. SMALL WOMAN ‘BEANS’ BIG HUBBY WITH HARD SAUSAGE AND RAW LIVER, proclaimed another. LOWLY PEANUT HAS HOUR OF TRIUMPH.
William D. Boyce owned the Blade. He was a bootstraps man, and his life story doubled as his faith. He worked as a coal miner when he was young, but eventually he saved some money, invested it, and became a multimillionaire. He founded the Boy Scouts of America and believed that the paperboys who distributed his tabloid were a pure expression of the country’s entrepreneurial spirit. They had names like Raymond Gamble and Lawrence Eagle and Carl Ray, and their pictures appeared in every issue of the paper—hair neatly combed, chaste smiles on their faces. They lived in places like Black Lick, Pennsylvania, and London, Ohio, and they were the image of Middle American rectitude.
But Nelson and Somerhaus were not. Selling papers was a mercenary enterprise for them, not a moral crusade. They worked the corner of Seventy-first Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, where two train lines crossed—one running north and south, to the Loop and back, and the other heading west toward Halsted Street. They announced the Blade’s blood-red headlines while flitting from train to train, sipped from their cans of trub, and swelled with pride when they succeeded in cheating their customers.
Nelson timed his sales to the streetcars’ movements when he could. If a customer paid him with a dime, he accepted their money and began digging in his pockets for coins. It was an act. When the car began rolling, Nelson found what he was looking for. He raised a hand to display his customer’s change, and began stumbling. He lunged melodramatically, and made himself cough. He stopped to catch his breath, and began running again after the trolley had pulled so far ahead that he had no chance of catching it. Then he watched his mark recede into the distance and mimed disappointment.
He pled poverty when someone paid with a quarter. I don’t have enough change, he’d say, and ask his customer to wait while he got some. Then he’d run across the street toward the saloon on the corner opposite the trolley stop, enter through the front door, and disappear through the women’s entrance on the side of the building. He would hide there until his customer tired of waiting and walked away.
After the boys sold through their papers, they sat on the corner. The Oak Woods cemetery fence was at their back—thick wrought-iron bars wrapped around 180 acres of rolling green. The sidewalk beneath them radiated heat from the day’s sun, and the neighborhood saloon, the focus of their attention, was directly across the street.
Somerhaus’s uncle Johnson was the neighborhood brawler—the “white hope” of the corner of Seventy-first Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. He drank his days away in the bar and fought on the sidewalk out front on Saturday nights. The flickering blue-green flames of the gas lamps were his floodlights, and his ring was a circle of bodies.
Johnson usually picked his own fights, but when he neglected to, someone inside the bar arranged one. Words would be exchanged; threats made. The pretense didn’t matter, only the promise of blood.
The boys had to watch Johnson’s fights from across the street because the barkeep chased them off when they got too close, but even from a distance they could see the action—men pouring out of the bar, a ring of bodies forming on the sidewalk; Johnson swaying drunkenly and crooning like a man whose mouth was full of marbles.
Oh sweet Dardanella, he bellowed, I love your harem eyes / I’m a lucky fellow—a thick rope of spittle dangling from his lips, the crowd laughing.
No one ever taught Johnson to fight, and he never learned. When an opponent approached, he raised his hands to guard his face, but that was all. He didn
’t parry, and he didn’t dance. Instead, he lurched like a toy ship in a toddler’s bath and swung his fists wildly. Size was his only advantage. He was tall and thick, and he used his weight to tire his opponents—he leaned on them, shoved them, and absorbed flurries of punches with the resignation of a penitent paying down a mortal sin. Most weeks, that strategy served him well, but not always.
Once, the boys saw Johnson face a real fighter—a small, trim, muscular man who wore a cap that cast a shadow across his face and kept a lit cigarette in his mouth to show how little he feared his opponent. Its cherry glowed in the night like a taunt while they fought.
He approached Johnson casually and feigned a low punch. When Johnson dropped his hands to block it, the thin man smashed a fist into his teeth. Blood hit the sidewalk. The crowd cheered.
Then the thin man went to work. His feet scraped across the pavement, and he landed punches at will—to Johnson’s head, to his body, and to the head again—thunk, thunk, thunk.
Johnson tried to run, but his friends hooked their arms and tightened their grips so he couldn’t get free.
“You’ve got him now, Johnson!” they yelled.
“He’s on his last legs, Johnson,” someone lied. “Finish him.”
Johnson regarded the thin man—a shadow flitting lightly, a will-o’-the-wisp dancing in the night. He took a breath and raised his arm and pointed an accusatory finger. Then he advanced—six feet of bloody rage moving with the grace of an ox.
The thin man slammed a fist into Johnson’s chest when he got within reach. It landed where the ribs are most flexible and a good hit can force them against the heart and disrupt its rhythm. Commotio cordis, it’s called. The punch staggered Johnson, and the fight ended. The crowd returned to the bar. Someone wiped blood off Johnson’s face with a towel, and everyone resumed drinking.
“It’s just a case of a good little man lickin’ a good big man,” Somerhaus said, unconcerned. He often rooted for Johnson’s opponents. Nelson did not. He watched the fights intently without understanding why. They didn’t make him laugh, and he never cheered for either side. He walked away from each one feeling a “sort of city-wide sorrow,” he wrote later, and worried that “something had suddenly gone horrible wrong between St. Columbanus and the Oakwoods [sic] Cemetery gate.” But he kept returning, week after week.
There were two poles in Nelson’s life by 1920, and they were pulling him in opposite directions: Gerson was one; Bernice, the younger of Nelson’s two sisters, was the other. He encouraged Nelson to make peace with the fact that he would spend his life laboring. She counseled Nelson to explore the world outside of Park Manor, and endeavor to live a more rewarding life than their father’s.
Bernice was athletic, and precocious—an excellent student, and, even in her adolescence, an iconoclast. At approximately the same time as the pastor of the Park Manor Congregationalist Church was using his pulpit to decry “feminine modernists, who wink at the practice of drinking and smoking in women, or deny the alarming spread of these filthy habits,” she was delivering the valedictory speech at her grammar school graduation.
By the time Bernice entered high school, she had become charming, erudite, and confident. She continued to excel academically, but embraced her nonconformist instincts as well. Over the next three years, she received top scores in physics, wrote poetry, and proclaimed herself an atheist. She had aspired to become an actress when she was a child, but theater had since lost its appeal. Instead, she decided to become the first person in the Abraham family to earn a degree. In 1918, she took the entrance exam for Chicago Normal College, passed with high marks, and enrolled. It was her ambition to become a teacher.
Gerson and Bernice both had influence over Nelson for a while, but his standing diminished over time and hers grew in proportion. Nelson realized how naïve his father was when they grew close, and soon afterward he began looking to Bernice for direction. Luckily, she was an ideal role model—outspoken, full of ideas, and excited about living. She told Nelson there was more to life than baseball, fixing cars, and watching grown men beat each other in front of the corner saloon. She said he could become something more than a mechanic’s son if he wanted.
Bernice told Nelson to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, so he did. He got the book from the library and read its sixty-five rhyming poems—then he read them again, and again, until he knew them by heart. He studied them so closely that he could quote them from memory for decades afterward.
Bernice also encouraged Nelson to write, and he tried to do so just after he absorbed Stevenson’s poems. His first composition was a broadsheet newspaper patterned after the Saturday Blade. He called it the Chicago Evening News, and he created only a single copy of a single issue by writing on butcher paper with a well-sharpened pencil.
The dateline at the top of the front page of the News says March 6, 1920—three weeks before Nelson’s eleventh birthday—but there is no way it was written in a day. The paper has eight vertical columns of text that include political satire, fictional sports news, gossip, and employment listings. It reads like the end result of a long process of drafting, erasure, and revision—the work of an ambitious child with a focused mind and a creative impulse linked inextricably to his talent for observation.
The center of the front page of the News is dominated by a comic entitled “The Lonesome Hermit.” It shows a man standing at the side of a cliff, looking down at a ladder below his reach. Above his head are the words “Bolshevism Cave.” The ladder is marked “Intercourse with World,” and the man is thinking, “I wish I could get that ladder.” The columns surrounding the comic scissor freely between fact and fiction, but they all take their inspiration from current events. One is dedicated to a common 1920 fantasy: JACK JOHNSON TO FIGHT DEMPSEY. MARY PICKFORD GETS DIVORCE, another reads, and at the bottom of the page, qualified dishwashers are encouraged to apply for work at 2728 N. Clark Street.
Nelson folded the Chicago Evening News when it was complete, and put it away. Then he kept it safe for more than forty years.
The Abrahams left Park Manor a few months after Nelson created the News. They moved to a Jewish neighborhood on the North Side called Albany Park, and bought another small house with a porch and a tiny yard. Irene went to work as a secretary then, and Bernice started college. Nelson entered Hibbard Middle School. Goldie fulminated, and Gerson opened a tire and battery shop on Kedzie Avenue. He finally joined the owning class, but he did not become a boss—he worked six days a week, sometimes seven, and he had no employees.
Nelson spent eight years in Park Manor, and when he felt nostalgic as an adult, his mind lingered there. He wrote about his old neighborhood at length near the end of his career, but when he did so, he bent its story to shape the dark and cynical cast his mind had taken by then. In his telling, Park Manor was a synecdoche for a world that bends toward entropy—a place where people make a show of being conformist so they can lead sinful private lives, where good men kill themselves, and heroes are destined for villainy.
I sent a Valentine’s Day card to the only black girl in my class one year, Nelson wrote later, and my childhood sweetheart was enraged when she found out. “You send Valentines to niggers,” she swore. I took that girl to the neighborhood soda shop every Sunday for months before we split, he said, but our visits stopped suddenly when the shop’s owner died. He hung himself from the ceiling above the counter, and his body dangled above a jar of maraschino cherries for days before it was discovered.
Violence was the neighborhood’s common tongue, according to Nelson. There was a local bully, he said, and he was a terror. His name was Baldy Costello, and he punched me every time we crossed paths. After I moved, he raped and killed a sixteen-year-old girl. The Chicago race riots passed just north of my house, Nelson said. “Thousands of whites” were involved, and one afternoon my sister Bernice saw six of them drag a black man into a doorway. She heard a shot a moment later, and then she saw the white men stroll away casu
ally.
Even baseball, by Nelson’s telling, was a farce. The month after he left Park Manor, the White Sox were indicted for fixing the 1919 World Series with the help of the gambler Arnold Rothstein, and Swede Risberg was accused of playing a central role in the scheme. My love for the game and my friends’ love for the game “was not shaken” by the indictments and trial, Nelson wrote later. “But we stopped pitching baseball cards and took to shooting dice. The men whose pictures we had cherished were no longer gods.”
“Tell Your Tire Troubles to Nelson Abraham”
(September 1920–June 1927)
Lopsided cars pulled out of the traffic on Kedzie Avenue, rolled into Gerson Abraham’s garage riding their rims, lurched, and stopped. Their drivers stepped out of their vehicles, and then Gerson went to work.
He raised the car with a jack, unbolted the wheel with the flat tire, and pulled it off its axle. He removed the inner tube, pumped air into it, submerged it in a trough of water, and rotated it. Bubbles appeared at the site of the puncture, and Gerson removed the tube from the water when he spotted them, marked the area with a pencil, rubbed gasoline on it, and cut a rubber patch to size. Then he clamped the tube and the patch together with an electric iron, and waited. Acrid smoke rose; his eyes watered.
When the patch fused with the tube, Gerson removed the iron, filled the tube with air, and returned it to the trough. If no bubbles appeared, he fitted the tube inside the tire, hefted the wheel back onto the car’s axle, tightened the lug nuts, and lowered the jack. Then he collected a dollar from his customer, sometimes a dollar fifty—the cost of his labor added to the price he paid for supplies.
