My search for the hat had dropped me behind the children of my class, and I wondered if this odd older boy meant me harm.
“You’re Danny Dorsey,” he said. “You know who I am?”
“Sure.”
“You can walk with me. That kid Lenny is up there.” Lenny was a local tough, twelve or thirteen years old, a cause for terror among those of us who had seen him picking fights and stealing milk money from those smaller than he.
“You’re safe with me, see, because Lenny won’t push me around.”
“Why? Are you tough?”
“No, but I’m smart, and those kids all think I’m crazy. They’re afraid of what I’d do to them. They oughta be.”
I took this with a grain of salt but had to admire his style. Later, I learned that his assessment had been nothing more than the simple truth.
“So what do you like? Do you like baseball?”
I didn’t, not yet at least, but I said, “Oh, sure.”
He gave me an amused look, then said, “How ’bout science? You like science?” and his grin took over his face. “You like to explore places and discover stuff?” and I was able to give him a more enthusiastic answer. He nodded, gave me a little pat on the shoulder, and said, “Come on.”
I was to learn that he lived less than a block from us, in the projects with his mother; he was almost twelve, quick on his feet and unfettered by adult supervision or a conscience. There was no harm in him and I never saw him lose his temper, and I was fascinated by what seemed to be his essential “otherness.” In truth, he had been granted equal parts intelligence, imagination, and restlessness, and he prowled the neighborhood like a Molotov cocktail in Keds. From the vantage point of age, I can see that, except for me and one or two other boys who came to idolize him, Rusty never quite “related” to those around him: children were either his audience or obstacles to his ceaseless quest for diversion. He woke up looking for interesting things to discover, things to try out.
He spent a part of almost every day in a painstaking search of the neighborhood for pop bottles that he turned in for deposit; as a result he always had a pocketful of change. He was generous with these funds, and I was his most frequent beneficiary, trailing him into the little store across from the Hamlin Park pool, where he would buy me a Dr. Pepper and long paper rolls coated with little colored dots of candy. His pockets were jammed, his pants weighed down to bagginess by the enormity of his private treasures: marbles and coins and odd stones, the headless corpse of a lead soldier he considered a sort of talisman.
Frequently his pockets held one or more little bottles of flammable or otherwise questionable substances, for his doting mother had bought him a chemistry set—the true danger to American security in 1955 was not the blustering Soviets halfway around the world but the hundreds of thousands of children, many of them future criminals, who owned these little private munitions systems. With a chemistry set a child could set fire to his mother’s kitchen, could melt her Bakelite dishes, could render the local water supply undrinkable, could stain his skin a cherry red, could take the paint off walls, and, with the assistance of a sympathetic pharmacist, could even make that dark, dusty grail of childhood, gunpowder. Rusty had these frightening little vials and all the other hallowed weaponry of childhood as well, including a pen knife, matches, a magnifying glass, tacks, nails, and a single-edged razor blade.
Sometimes we sat under a tree at the park and talked, or rather he chattered and I listened, much as Matt and my younger friends did when I regaled them with my stories and ideas and comic impressions. He had no fear that I ever discerned in him, and this puzzled me, for he was skinny, poor, had no father to protect him, and when he wasn’t with me, he frequently roamed the streets alone. I knew that he often went into other neighborhoods and children took to him immediately, sensing perhaps that he was different.
As he had assured me, the worst toughs in our neighborhood seemed to have little interest in bothering him—they cut him a great deal of slack, as though he were the neighborhood holy man, touched by the gods with an insanity that awed them all. The violent, evil-tempered Lenny was manifestly terrified of Rusty. I was puzzled by this, for I’d seen Lenny fight, and he was not only mean but strong and quick, and a dirty fighter.
One day Rusty and I sat on the stairs outside the park swimming pool, drinking Birely’s orange soda and chewing penny candy. It seemed a propitious moment to dig for gold.
“Why is Lenny afraid of you?”
“’Cause he knows what’s good for ’im.”
“Did you ever fight Lenny?”
“Yeah, he gave me a bloody nose, that shit.”
“Then why is he afraid of you?”
“I got him back the next day.” He paused with red string licorice hanging from his mouth, looking as disturbed as a child could possibly look.
“What did you do?”
“He came after me again like I knew he would and I was ready. I had my snake.”
My mind went blank for a second. “Your snake?”
He nodded and slurped in the remaining licorice. “I put him down Lenny’s shirt. He’s scared of snakes.”
“Wow. Did it bite him?”
“Nah, they don’t bite, unless you’re a frog. But he was scared, I knew he would be. And I told him if he ever pushed me around again, I’d put it in his desk at school, and in his lunchbox. I told him I’d crawl into his house at night and put it in his bed. And he knew I would.” He smiled at a sudden recollection. “I told him they crawl into your ears at night, and he believed it, what a stupe!” Rusty leaned back, contented, having apparently conquered most of the known universe without throwing a single punch.
The snake, as it turned out, had passed away under Rusty’s erratic care, to the delight of his mother. He maintained that he could find one in a “prairie” in ten minutes, but his mother had bought him off with a gigantic scale model of the USS Forrestal, for model building was another of his weaknesses. Of all the odd children I was to come to know, he was the most singular. In my own life, there was never a day when I didn’t experience some sort of fear: fear that eventually I’d be alone again, fear for my uncles, fear for cousin Matt, fear of the strange kids and stranger adults that peopled the city. And Rusty was the sole child I was ever to encounter who seemed to have put such things behind him.
More than anything else, though, he was as entertaining a companion as I ever found. He knew about snakes, caught spiders and centipedes, could pelt an alley rat with a rock at twenty paces, and believed that much of the known world existed for our amusement: on a very hot day at summer’s end, at the parish Labor Day picnic, I was to see Rusty put on a display of his talents that would make him a neighborhood legend.
Later, in January of 1959, as a high school freshman, Rusty was to prove that these demonstrations were neither accident nor fluke: this time he detonated a porcelain commode in the second floor bathroom of De Paul Academy. The explosion blew out two windows and embedded pieces of the toilet in the ceiling. The explosion was attributed by the puzzled school authorities to a buildup of sewer gas, this explanation provided on-site by Rusty and his companions, and accepted by the good Vincentian Fathers because Rusty was the prize student in their science classes. On that day he passed into high school folklore. Three years later he graduated from the academy with high honors, riding a full scholarship to Illinois Institute of Technology. I envisioned him becoming a sort of free agent in the arms race.
One warm afternoon Rusty brought me up into his house for Kool-Aid, and we drank half the pitcher out of little metallic tumblers. It was a small apartment like my cousin Matt’s, with hard black floors made of some sort of tile that looked like rubber and felt like marble. Their kitchen window looked out onto the Chicago River, and I stood there watching the water while Rusty went to the bathroom. When we were leaving, I noticed a little table set right beside the do
or, so that people would see it when they entered or left. On the table was a photograph of a serious-looking man in a tie and suit. Next to the photo was a wedding picture of the man and Rusty’s mother, whom I had met a couple of times on the street and seen at church.
“That’s my dad,” he said.
“What’d he die of?”
“He had a heart attack,” Rusty said, pulling open the door. “He could carve stuff from wood and stuff like that.”
“Really? What kinda stuff?”
“Animals, planes, boats, anything.” He pointed to a shelf holding a couple of small wooden ships.
I nodded. “You got gypped.”
Rusty shrugged. “So did you, right?” I nodded and then I followed him out into the hall.
More than once we attempted to fish in the river, garnering a striking collection of odd objects for our efforts, but no fish. We caught a wet cardboard carton, a piece of raincoat, a section of hose, and a dead rat which Rusty examined at great length.
“This is tremendous. I oughtta take him home,” he said.
“Your ma.”
“Yeah, I know. Grown-ups have no interest in science.” He looked off into the distance and I knew his thirst for knowledge had temporarily taken over his common sense: this was when he was most dangerous. “I can wrap him in tinfoil and put him in the freezer. I’ll dissect him later.”
“Can I come?”
“Oh, sure, you can be my assistant.”
I had seen enough of the “science” movies with my uncle to realize that the assistant was always in the very eye of the hurricane, he was essential, frequently being sent out to secure elements vital to the operation, such as human body parts, spare eyes, and the like. I felt honored.
Tragically—to our way of thinking—Rusty’s embattled mother found the rat in her freezer before we had a chance to practice science on it. She didn’t punish him, from what he said, she had never laid a hand on him, but she didn’t talk to him for three days. He said she was letting herself get carried away, that the rat was so frozen it couldn’t even smell, but she thought the mere presence of the rat was crime enough and, for reasons neither of us understood, seemed to think the matter was aggravated by the fact that the dead beast had been fished out of the Chicago River.
“Least we didn’t find it in a dirty old alley,” Rusty said, and I agreed, for like all the children of the neighborhood we thought the Chicago River a splendid thing indeed, no matter what adults thought of it. We spent the rest of that day hunting rabbits in a prairie a mile west of our neighborhood, where he said he’d seen one. He clearly felt that a frozen rabbit would not be nearly as objectionable to his mother as the rat had been, and here again I thought he made great sense. His mother proved intractable in the matter of science: I later learned that she felt the same way about frogs in her freezer as she did about the rat.
My association with Rusty that spring and the following summer was not only my first taste of science but the beginning of a career in general malfeasance. I understood, if somewhat dimly, that he was not totally conscious of the concepts and constraints that bound other people to a certain code of behavior, but I couldn’t see how that might affect me. We didn’t actually break into anyone’s private property as I had with Matt and Terry Logan, but we went where we wanted, welcome or not. Unaware of his proclivities, my grandparents allowed me more independence in Rusty’s company because of his age, so that I was able to range far and wide with their blessing.
I followed him across the North Side and witnessed his endless experiments with fireworks—he blew up dead fish with a small firecracker, atomized an old suitcase with a cherry bomb—and I thought I was simply being an apostle of science.
We went “fishing”—using a large piece of nylon mesh to catch alewives and smelt off the rocks at Belmont, and had a joyous time pelting passing cars with our catch on the way home, stopping to stuff a couple into a mailbox and deposit the remaining pair in the frozen food cooler of a small grocery store on Diversey.
We invaded the Chicago Historical Society—Grandma Flynn was pleasantly surprised to hear that we were visiting a museum instead of instigating a public disturbance. Once inside the little museum, we learned that the Civil War field piece could indeed be wheeled about and its barrel elevated by turning the screw mechanism below, and we were treating the other patrons to an imaginary shelling when the security guard chased us from the building. (Much later in life I visited the Historical Society and, when I was sure no one was watching, attempted to elevate the cannon’s barrel: the screw had been cemented in place, and I took this as a silent memorial to a pair of wayward boys who knew few limits on a warm spring day.)
We stole into Wrigley Field after school and found box seats on a day that found the Cubs and the Pirates already locked in the most serious contest of the season, the traditional battle for sole possession of last place. There were no more than two thousand people in the park, and the Andy Frain ushers wouldn’t have noticed if we’d set fire to the Cub dugout.
At night I would proudly recount my exploits to my uncles, and they would blink and say, “You what?” or, “Don’t tell your grandmother.” Uncle Mike in particular, with his more narrow view of normal behavior, was fond of asking, “Tell me something. Is that kid nuts?” whenever Rusty was mentioned. Uncle Tom would put on his most pontifical expression and say, “Whatever you do, champ, don’t get put in the slammer.”
First Communion, Against All Odds
May came along and with it one of the milestones of a Catholic childhood, First Communion. This was an eagerly awaited moment, the earliest of the numerous hallmarks of civilization in an Irish Catholic house, and despite threats to the contrary from our teachers and principal, Matt and I were relieved to hear that we would be included. I had never really thought I wouldn’t be allowed to make Communion, but there had been grave doubt about Matt’s chances. The ceremony and Communion Mass took place on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and St. Bonaventure Church was packed with hundreds of well-dressed, sweaty Catholics.
The female communicants were dressed in white dresses with veils, the boys in white shirts and ties, so that we looked like a mass wedding of very short people. My classmates looked so outlandish in their once-in-a-lifetime finery that it was a shock to see some of them. One boy was unrecognizable, never having been seen before with his hair combed out of his face and his shirt tucked into his pants. We surrounded him in wonder and examined his new persona, seeing him literally for the first time.
It was warm in the church, and you could smell the dozens of kinds of hair oil, Wildroot or Vitalis or VO5, struggling to assert themselves amid the cloud of perfume, cologne, and talcum powder. I had shown a penchant for fainting during long, hot church services, and when I saw that this was to be a solemn High Mass, I knew I’d probably be on the canvas for at least part of it. My classmates were aware of this unfortunate proclivity, had been present for a couple of my more notable swan dives, and I became one of the minor attractions of the service. I saw my friends grinning at me, pretending to swoon, and I snarled at them all.
Once we had been corralled into our pews in the front, I took a nervous look around for my family and saw them, crammed into a single pew in the center of the church, with a half dozen or so of the Dorseys right behind them, waving to both Matt and me. They all looked hot, several of the men looked mildly annoyed, and Matt’s father Dennis looked sick. The women were either happy to be there or putting the best face on it, all except my grandmother, who was manifestly worried. I’d caught a whiff of her anxiety on the ride over to the church, and Uncle Tom had explained it all for me.
“She’s worried.”
“About what? About me fainting?”
“What? No, I forgot about that. No, you’re not gonna faint. No, see, she remembers my First Communion. There was trouble.” He said “trouble” but sounded delighted.
&nbs
p; “What happened?”
“After the Mass, my dad and Uncle Frank and Uncle Martin and half a dozen of these Irish old-timers went down to the gin mill on the corner, where they run into about a hundred other fathers and brothers, and they’ve all been in church working up a thirst.
“And Uncle Frank, he was still a cop then, and he never waited in line for anything in his life, so he bulls his way to the bar and a couple guys didn’t like it, and one of ’em shoves Frank and he decks the guy and pretty soon he’s managed to start a brawl. They wrecked the saloon. An hour later, him, my dad, Uncle Martin, and about thirty of these other guys are all in jail. The rest of us are at home where my ma has cooked this big dinner, and there’s no men at it because they’re all in the slammer.”
He put his hand over his eyes and laughed silently for a moment. “If I live to be a hundred and ten, I’ll never forget seeing them come home after the cops let ’em out, the three of ’em slinking into the dining room. It’s full of my aunts and my sisters and the McReady sisters and a couple other people, and your grandma is standing there staring at ’em like she just seen roaches coming in under the door.”
“‘On your son’s First Communion day, Patrick,’ she says in this kinda whisper that she wants everybody to hear, and he just points to her brother. And Uncle Frank’s looking like he needs a good lawyer, and she says to him, ‘Francis, if you weren’t my brother, I’d brain you with a chair.’ And old Frank had the good sense not to say a thing.”
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 20