Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Nelson worked in the garage too. He joined his father after school occasionally, helped out on Saturdays, and opened the shop by himself on Sunday mornings. He studied Gerson’s technique when they worked together, and tried to match his father’s talent, and speed. Customers sometimes complimented Nelson’s work, and when they did, he felt proud.

  After they closed the shop for the evening, Gerson and Nelson walked down Kedzie Avenue toward home. Gerson wore slacks and a jacket; Nelson wore short pants. Their hands were speckled with globs of rubber, and their throats stung. The day’s earnings clinked in Gerson’s pockets. Trolleys passed them, heading south toward the Loop or north toward Skokie as they walked, and so did horses, Stephens Roadsters with spoked wooden wheels and canvas tops, and Jordans with sensuous body lines and chromed headlights.

  Their neighborhood, Albany Park, was semi-suburban and mannered. Its avenues were lined by department stores, restaurants, and theaters, and its residential streets were a postcard scene of economy and aspiration—two-family homes and neatly spaced trees. The area’s thirty thousand residents commuted to the Loop each morning on the Ravenswood El line together, filled the pews of the neighborhood’s synagogues and churches every weekend, and worried about the value of their homes. Most, like Goldie, had spent their childhoods crowded into tenements near the center of the city and lived for the day they could afford to move farther north, to Hollywood Park, or maybe Rosehill.

  Nelson and Gerson reached their home at 4834 North Troy Street a few minutes after leaving the tire shop, and entered. The air was heavy and still inside, and the light was dim. It was a dreary house, but more peaceful than the one in Park Manor had been—less crowded, quieter.

  Irene was gone. She had moved to New York City shortly after Nelson entered high school, and found work as a secretary for a sheet music company. She rented an apartment on Creston Avenue, in the Bronx, and avoided marriage as if it were a communicable disease. Bernice came and went—brightening the house, and then disappearing. She was working as a substitute teacher, and her income liberated her. She attended the symphony and the opera regularly, and co-owned a cottage on the sand dunes in Gary, Indiana, with several other teachers. When it was warm, she spent weekends there. She swam competitively in college, and she could still walk down the beach in Gary, slip into the water, and swim a mile with ease.

  Gerson and Goldie had reached détente. They were getting too old to fight the way they once had. He was fifty-four years old when Nelson entered high school; she was forty-four. They had been married for a quarter century, and their relationship had finally settled into a tolerable rhythm. She made soup twice a day because it was his favorite food, and he held his tongue while she rambled. On Sundays, his only day off, she left him in peace while he sat on the back porch and logged the week’s earnings in a little notebook smeared with rubber.

  Goldie no longer bothered Nelson either. He was nearly six feet tall, and athletic in a rangy, undisciplined way. He ran track and played basketball, but he weighed less than 135 pounds, so he looked like a willow branch draped in a jersey when he did. He was too scrawny to be a fighter, but too big for Goldie to beat, so she preserved the idea of her authority by avoiding confrontation.

  Nelson’s friends were Benton Curtis, Ralph Zwick, and Jerome Hanock, and they were as tame as the neighborhood that raised them. “We were the kind who did as we were told,” Curtis said. He was a mechanic’s son, like Nelson. Zwick’s father owned a hardware store, and Hanock worked at Sears, Roebuck every summer to prepare for a career as a purchaser.

  The boys met when they entered Hibbard High School in 1923, and for the next three years they considered themselves brothers. When classes dismissed on weekday afternoons, everyone not working that day would gather at Nelson’s house to play penny-ante poker, or visit a boy named Sidney Yates who lived nearby. He had invented a game that used playing cards as avatars for professional baseball players, and the boys could lose hours imagining their way into the big leagues.* They studied together, too, pitched pennies along the sidewalk, or, if there was nothing else to do, bounced a ball off the steps of their school.

  More than once, Nelson, Curtis, Zwick, and Hanock pooled their money and bought cars. They saved until they had twenty or twenty-five dollars, and then they went looking for a wreck—maybe a Model T with a sheet-metal body and a straight-four engine that idled roughly. Then they fixed it. Nelson knew tires, and Curtis understood engines. He could drive, too, and when the brothers got their first car running, he taught the rest of them. They were fourteen or fifteen years old, but when they rolled through Albany Park, seeing and being seen, they felt like men. Sometimes, they drove south to Gary on weekends and spent a night in Bernice’s cottage, beyond the reach of their parents’ authority.

  The boys had humble ambitions. They planned to graduate, and then follow their fathers into the working world. They could see their futures clearly in the distance, and as they plodded toward them, they indulged only one fantasy: basketball stardom. It was “our great aim in life,” Curtis said.

  Chicago youths were enraptured by the game. It was mostly amateur at the time, and fully segregated—a sport for gangly teenagers who dribbled slowly and shot from deep court. College and high school teams dominated; professionals were an afterthought. The biggest event of the year was a national interscholastic tournament hosted by the University of Chicago, but there were dozens of independent teams in the city as well—churches, sports clubs, and settlement houses sponsored them, and they had their own tournaments, champions, and bragging rights.

  The boys thought they played well enough to compete in one of those local leagues, so late in 1925, they decided to form a team. Their goal was to qualify for the Chicago Boys’ Tournament—a citywide competition scheduled to begin early the following year. If they won, or came close, they would get their names in the local papers and earn a bit of glory they could cherish after they entered the adult world.

  They spread word of their plan through Albany Park, and scheduled a meeting to discuss it on October 25. Seven people attended that first night, including the brothers, and Curtis was elected team captain. They met again the following day, decided their colors would be red and white, and voted to call themselves the Uptown Arrows. Training began immediately.

  The team was a serious enterprise for the boys. They gathered at a community center called the Herman Beardsley Butler House every Monday and Thursday that fall, and played for an hour and a half—shooting, passing, and racing across court while their sweat dappled the gym’s waxed floors. Between practice sessions, they held team meetings.

  The Arrows stepped on the court for their first league game in early winter looking like winners. They were confident, and their custom red and white jerseys were clean and new. Nelson was a guard. It was his job to linger by the basket, snatch rebounds, run, and shoot. He had the right physique for the position, but he learned that day that he needed more than height and energy to be a ball player. He never scored, and the team lost, 26–9.

  The Uptown Arrows picked up some momentum when they defeated a squad from Christ Lutheran their second time out, but couldn’t maintain it. Their enthusiasm was no substitute for talent. They kept a detailed record of their team’s history in a thin notebook. It begins as a breathless chronicle of selecting players, electing officers, and debating names, but quickly devolves into a spare and depressing chronicle. One item from January reads, “[Nelson] Abraham continues in his slump, again failing to register a point.”

  The Uptown Arrows made it to the Chicago Boys’ Tournament the way they had planned, but just barely. Their record was ten wins, seventeen losses, and one tie. They played their first tournament game on February 10, 1926, and lost. They were eliminated from the competition, and the team disbanded afterward.

  Nelson was upset by the Arrows’ defeat, but his disappointment was soon eclipsed by a more profound loss. Months earlier, his sister Bernice had agreed to marry a man named Morris J
offe, and their wedding—an event Nelson interpreted as a betrayal—had finally been scheduled.

  Bernice and Joffe had met on the beach in Gary about three years earlier. She was picnicking with friends from work on the day in question. He was visiting with a fraternity from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (their guest, not a member—he couldn’t join because he was Jewish). He was paying his way through school by cleaning their house, and they showed their gratitude by allowing him to accompany them on trips. Some people would be offended by that arrangement, but not Morris. There was a mercenary aspect to his character. He was engaged to marry a different woman the day he met Bernice, but he called off the wedding when Bernice agreed to date him.

  No one understood what Bernice saw in Morris, Nelson least of all. He hated the man from the moment they were introduced. At first, his distaste was instinctual, but in time he found cause.

  Nelson admired and respected Bernice, and Morris was her antithesis in every way that mattered. She was an atheist with a vivid intelligence and a deep appreciation for art. He was a striver’s striver—a conservative man who wore expensive clothes and never read for pleasure. He grew up poor, but became a chemical engineer after graduating college, registered a few patents, and began amassing a small fortune. He attended synagogue and kept kosher, but only because it was expected. He was no believer, and the people who knew him best said he was only truly interested in himself.

  Bernice and Morris married in 1926, and moved into an apartment on Ainslie Street. It was only a few blocks from Gerson and Goldie’s house, but Nelson rarely visited. He felt Bernice had rejected him when she wed Morris, and rejected the values they shared as well. She had introduced him to books, taught him to think critically, and told him to ignore the example their parents set with their loveless marriage. But when it was her turn to be bold, she accepted the consort of a man whose only virtue was his steady income.

  That summer, Nelson and Curtis drove to Gary so they could spend their last long break before the end of high school on the beach. Zwick and Hanock remained in Chicago to work. The boys moved into the cottage Bernice co-owned with her teaching colleagues and lingered there for weeks, walking on the sand and watching the fall approach like a storm cloud on the horizon. Flames from the blast furnaces of the Gary Works steel mill licked the sky to the north, water lapped at their feet, and they worried about the future.

  “We felt life was passing us by,” Curtis said. He thought there was a civil service job in his future, but the prospect brought him no joy. Nelson talked about becoming a journalist, but talk was all he did. He had been feeling cynical and lonely since Bernice married Joffe and moved away, and he dwelled on her perceived betrayal throughout the summer. He felt that he had suffered a great loss, and he nurtured that sensation until it opened a fissure in his life that divided his adolescence into a “before” and an “after”—a time when he had brothers, and the solitary years that followed; the era when he claimed heroes, and the period when he defined people by their shortcomings.

  Chicago meant freight lines and slaughterhouses when Nelson was young—factories that spit steel, and stoic men who worked until their bodies gave out. But it had changed since. Gangland figures captured the public’s imagination in the early 1920s, and by the middle of the decade the city was more closely associated with the names O’Banion, Torrio, and Capone than it was with International Harvester or Union Stock Yards.

  Chicago’s new archetypes were audacious characters. They wore wide-lapelled suits instead of coveralls, carried guns, drank, and operated on pure id. They fought each other for territory like warring European kings, paid off police officers, and manufactured liquor at industrial scale despite Prohibition. They filled the papers with headlines like GANGSTER FOUND SHOT TO DEATH, BURIED IN ASHES, and they operated brothels and gambling parlors even in the city’s quietest neighborhoods.

  One of those operations was located in the building next to Gerson’s tire shop. It was called Johnson’s, and it was an open secret in Albany Park. Armed guards stood out front, and young men came and went at all hours, wearing pretty women on their arms. There was another club on the other side of Kedzie—a sister organization—and large men regularly drove trucks down the street, parked in front of one of the clubs, and then went inside and began emptying it. They loaded cases of liquor, tables, and chairs into the trucks, and then drove to the other club and unloaded while the neighborhood watched. An hour or so later, the police would raid the building that had just been emptied and find nothing.

  Johnson’s had been tempting Nelson for years. He and Curtis had ogled the cars parked out front, and watched police disappear inside and emerge hours later. But he didn’t try to visit until after he returned from his trip to Gary.†

  The first time Nelson visited Johnson’s, he entered the building alone, passed an armed guard who scrutinized him, walked through a restaurant on the ground floor, and climbed a flight of stairs. He entered a closed room at the top, where a second guard frisked him, and then he was allowed into the club.

  Dice clacked and roulette wheels spun inside Johnson’s. Playing cards riffled as dealers shuffled them, and money was scattered on tables like scrap paper. A bartender stood behind a bar shaped like a horseshoe and served liquor to confident, loose-limbed men.

  Nelson took in the scene, and recognized a few faces. He had patched tires for some of the club’s regulars, and maybe that connection gave him the nerve to approach one of the tables. He had money from working at the garage and he understood poker, so he placed a wager—then another, and another.

  Johnson’s was a revelation for Nelson—a new paradigm for understanding the world. The Albany Park he knew was a maze of routine and obligation, where plans were made in units of years and decades. But inside the club, the future was an abstraction, and people were emancipated from the concerns he had been inculcated with. They abided no schedules and obeyed no laws they could circumvent. They rode waves of endorphins and liquor wherever they led—peaking when they hit their numbers, and plunging into the trough when they crapped out, but always, even in their darkest moments, giving the impression they were members of a species so high on the food chain, it made its own rules.

  Johnson’s had a narcotic appeal for Nelson. He returned soon after his first visit, and by winter he was a club regular and the brothers had lost track of him. The four of them never had a falling-out, or fought, but every time Curtis, Zwick, and Hanock tried to make plans with Nelson during senior year, he told them he was busy. In his absence, they gossiped about him. They traded stories about speakeasies with armed guards, and big wagers, but in truth they knew little about how Nelson was spending his time.

  Nelson was still working in Gerson’s garage in early 1927, but by then his attitude had changed. He could see what other people saw when they looked at his father—a meek old man whose callused hands would never be clean—and when he watched Gerson kneel down to peer beneath a young customer’s car, and heard that customer tell Gerson to hurry up, he felt a “pang of shame.”

  Nelson made no attempt to conceal his scorn. He adopted a condescending attitude toward his father that winter, and began offering him unsolicited advice.

  Gerson didn’t mark up the price of the supplies he used when he charged customers, so he only profited from his labor, and Nelson thought that was foolish.

  You have to mark up the prices if you want to make real money, he insisted.

  Gerson refused. “I can’t charge more than what I paid for it, can I?” he demanded.

  “Of course,” Nelson replied. The grocer charges more for his products than he pays to buy them, doesn’t he?

  “That’s different,” Gerson said. “He’s a business man.”

  Gerson was scandalized by Johnson’s and mystified by the fact that the club was able to operate openly, so Nelson antagonized him by flaunting his connections there. He told Gerson about the horseshoe-shaped bar, the liquor, and the police who visited
to collect bribes. But Gerson refused to listen. “Well, that’s crazy,” he said. “A cop can’t do that; they’d put him in jail. That would be dishonest.”

  “Cops, Pa, cops take money, cops steal,” Nelson said.

  “I don’t want to listen to crazy talk like that,” Gerson said. “A cop, a policeman is made to defend the law! That is why he is a policeman.”

  “Don’t act like that, Pa,” Nelson said, almost pleading.

  Months passed that way. Nelson sniped, Gerson sputtered defensively, and tension built between them. Their conflict finally reached a breaking point early on a Sunday morning. Nelson had gone out the night before, won forty dollars shooting craps, and got home late. He was still in bed a little before nine o’ clock when he heard Goldie say it was time for him to get up and open the garage. He ignored her. He didn’t need the few dollars he would earn patching tires for a day, so he went back to sleep.

  Gerson walked into the room about half an hour later.

  “Are you going to open the shop?” he asked.

  “Open it yourself,” Nelson said.

  And Gerson did. He worked seven days that week, and seven days the next, and the one after it. Nelson never went back to the garage, and his father never had another day off.

  Nelson was nearly estranged from his father by the end of his senior year, and still distant from his friends. He was moody, listless—nervous about the future, but unwilling to admit it. Gerson was pressing him to decide what he would do next, but Nelson resisted. They argued more.

  Gerson wanted Nelson to join a union and become someone’s apprentice, or maybe enter a trade school. “Now it’s time for you to be a draftsman,” he said, “to be something.”

  Nelson responded with calculated nonchalance. “I’ll get by,” he told his father, but he didn’t say how.

  Their argument dragged on without either side conceding, until Bernice intervened. She and Nelson hadn’t been seeing each other much, but she still felt obliged to speak on his behalf. “He’s going to college,” she told her parents. She said she and Morris would pay Nelson’s tuition at the University of Illinois, if he agreed to two conditions: he had to pay for his own books, food, and housing, and he had to pursue a practical degree.