by Stuart Dybek
“As long as it’s just fuel pumps you’re sucking,” the Bo said, winking at Stosh and rapping his shoulder.
“I was making out the other night and the girl kept complaining my breath smelled like Texaco,” Stosh complained.
Bigbo rolled out of the Merc chuckling, holding himself as if he’d been kicked in the groin. “She even knew the flavor, huh?”
“No, it was Marvel. Sometimes she can be so wrong.”
“Chicks! Too fucken much! Here, man,” he said, digging deep in his coveralls and extracting a thin, grease-imprinted twist of paper that he slipped into Stosh’s shirt pocket. “A little taste for later … dynamite shit, babe. Don’t say I never gave you nothin.”
“Hey, I’m afraid to light matches around my mouth, but thanks anyway,” Stosh said, ducking under a Bigbo embracio—so Bigbo gave his ass a pat instead.
Stosh slid into the car, handed the gas money out the window, adjusting his shades.
“Hey, man,” the Bo asked, catching a glimpse of Stosh’s bruised eye. “Who coldcocked you?”
Stosh merely shrugged.
“So where you guys off to this early? Scare up some puzzy?” He pronounced it “puzzy,” the way some guys in the neighborhood called sewers “zewers.”
“Picking orchids … here, don’t say I never gave you nothin,” Stosh said, tossing him our orchid, then popping the Merc into first so we shimmied off on a streak of rubber.
We were in third doing fifty through the pinging dust along the curb, passing semis on the right.
“Does need some weight in the ass end,” Stosh said.
I slid a few bucks across the dash.
“What’s this?” he asked, dumbfounded.
“For gas.” Since Stosh had the wheels, Angel and I kicked in for gas whenever we went riding.
“Has it come to this?” Stosh asked, pushing the money back with distaste as if he was through honoring a tradition that was beneath us. Ever since getting out of high school he’d been in some higher gear: Beethoven, the sleep fast, Mexico, now no gas money was all part of it. “The bullshit is over,” he’d said into the microphone when they’d handed him his diploma, then added ominously, “You must change your life.” He’d read that somewhere. Stosh had been reading a lot. The backseat of the Merc was a clutter of paperbacks.
We fishtailed left on Thirty-first, gunning past the Hospital for Contagious Diseases.
“I always hold my breath when I go by so I don’t inhale the plague or something,” Stosh said.
By the next block we’d slowed to a crawl, hugging the curb as we passed the city auto pound. Stosh checked the pound regularly for parts we’d strip at night.
“I’d rather luck into a pump here than get one from the Bo,” he said.
“He’d like to give you a pump all right.” I leered with a Bigbo-like wink and tugged at my crotch.
“Just as long as it’s your own balls you’re grabbing, babe.”
Halfway down the three-block span of wrecks we spotted a black Chrysler, or what was left of one. Scorched, front end mangled, it appeared to have collided head on with a train.
“No fuel pump there …,” I started to say, when a greasy Doberman that looked as if it might have been feeding on the corpses lunged out snarling through the busted windshield. We’d never seen a watchdog at the auto pound before. “Goddamn!” I said, my eyes fused to the dog’s, which were hot with fury. “I wouldn’t want to be surprised at night by that.”
“Don’t look! Don’t say anything,” Stosh cautioned. “If the gods don’t think we’ve seen it, then it can’t be used against us as a fucking omen.”
He stomped the gas, and we bounced over the rail tracks at Twenty-sixth just as the gates were dinging down. We followed the curving grade of the tracks along a deserted cobblestone street, then pulled into a concrete tunnel that ran under the railroad embankment. I jumped out and lifted a padlocked metal gate off its rusted hinges, and Stosh drove through the tunnel and onto an oiled cinder road that wound among mountains of scrap metal, coal, rock salt, sand, gravel. He stopped beside a cliff of bricks and broken concrete hauled from demolition sites all over the city and dumped here on the shore of what we referred to as the Insanitary Canal or, more simply, Shit Creek.
We hefted hunks of cinder block into the open trunk to balance the back end against the weight of the engine. No matter how we rearranged the blocks, it seemed to me the car was listing, but I didn’t mention it. Stosh took setbacks with the Merc too hard.
He was rocking the car, woefully shaking his head. “What it really needs now is goddamn heavy-duty shocks,” he said.
“As long as we’re here, we might as well check out the cop cycles,” I suggested, hoping it didn’t sound like a vote of no confidence in the Merc.
Stosh’s brother, Gordo, had told us that beyond the Fire Truck Graveyard there was another junkyard, the Cop Cycle Burial Ground, where old police three-wheelers went to die. According to Gordo, the three-wheelers were taken off the streets after a certain number of miles and not all of them were burned out. They had big Harley engines, and Gordo figured it might be possible to fire them up and drive off with a couple.
I didn’t bother pointing out that tooling around on a stolen three-wheeler with the Chicago Police Department seal on it might be a little conspicuous. But later the idea occurred to me that we could spray-paint them black, drive back streets out of the city in the dead of night, and by dawn have made our getaway to Mexico.
The Fire Truck Graveyard was deserted as always. We’d discovered it back in grade school when we’d pedal our bikes to explore along Shit Creek. The faded red enamel of the rusting trucks looked polished in the baking sun. At their sides, weathered wooden ladders still hung at the ready along with frayed, cracked hoses. A few trucks had big chrome bells waiting to clang. There were fire trucks so old you could see the hitches that had attached them to galloping teams of horses. It was a place where the tangible presence of history inspired a kind of reverence—not a feeling frequently encountered in Chicago—like an outdoor museum but better, because we could clamber around, crank the old hand pumps and winches, sit in the perch on the hook and ladder where the tillerman steered, and no one would bother us.
I could smell the familiar scent of milkweed laced with the creosote reek of the canal, but instead of the usual elation, I was feeling uneasy. The last time I’d been here had been with Laurel, and now it felt as if I’d ruined the place for myself.
I had wanted to sing her song, “Bus Girl,” to her while clanging a fire bell. Just thinking about it made me cringe inside.
I’d shredded the sheet music, not that it erased the scene from my mind. The only thing about the song I’d managed to forget was the original melody, which I’d dreamed one night back in winter. In my dream, she was dancing along the aisle of an empty bus with frosted windows that I was blindly driving, and when I woke I could still remember how lovely the song she was dancing to had been, but the melody itself was vanishing like one of those subatomic particles that decay as soon as they’re created.
Maybe everything with Laurel should have remained a dream. Trying to make it real had ruined it. Maybe my instincts had been right: if we’d just kept meeting as if by accident I’d never have had to wake from that private world of frosted windows. Maybe we could have sustained the intimacy of that corner booth, beside a window blurry with steam and rain, at the neighborhood Chinese restaurant where we took to meeting after her dance class. We’d sit sipping little cups of tea and talking. I loved listening to her, watching the expressions flash across her elfin eyes while she talked. I wasn’t aware I was staring until she observed, “You know, we’ve both got green eyes, except yours are a green brown and mine green blue.”
It was in the Chinese restaurant, sharing the garlic shrimp, that I told her how much I detested high school, especially after they’d expelled my buddy Angel, and that I was boycotting the prom, and Laurel kiddingly said, “Are you sure it’s not bec
ause you don’t have a date?”
Kind of kidding back, I said, “Well, now that you mention it, want to go?”
“Okay,” she said, which shocked me, “as long as we don’t end up in the same places everybody else does. I’ve done the prom bit already.”
“I know this jazz club, the Blue Note.”
“Sounds neat. You’ve been there?”
“Sure,” I said, though actually I’d only heard about it from my uncle Lefty, who’d once seen Miles Davis there.
Thinking about her now, I wished that, rather than traipsing down an aisle of obsolete fire trucks beside the Insanitary Canal, I was hacking through jungle, exploring an unmapped river while monkeys yammered and macaws screamed.
Stosh and I crossed an unfenced field where other city vehicles—ambulances, squad cars, paddy wagons—sat junked in the weeds. Beyond them, lined up in a row that bordered the canal, were the three-wheelers.
“Now I understand why cops have to have such fat asses,” Stosh said.
The saddles were huge. We climbed onto a couple and sat working the gears, wringing the accelerators, and squeezing the hand brakes as if racing neck and neck. In the hot sun, with insects and birds twittering from the brush, and the fecal brown canal drifting by in glittering slow motion, more like lava than water, it felt as if we were already somewhere else. I could picture Stosh, Angel, and me, three abreast, tooling down an empty, blazing highway.
“These would be perfect, man,” I said. “They even have trunks. We could keep all our travel shit back there.”
“What travel shit?”
“Blankets, pots and pans, extra clothes …”
“Pots and pans!” Stosh said. “You don’t even have a pot to pee in.”
“That’s exactly what my old man tells me.”
“He’s right. Why the fuck would we bring pots and pans? You know how to cook?”
“I can heat up chili.”
Mexico had been my idea, and every so often, especially when the Merc was causing problems, Stosh could get a little negative. He’d lose sight of it: the three of us on our cop cycles, gunning off the highway onto a dirt road past the glowing Texaco pumps of a small gas station somewhere in Oklahoma maybe, pitching camp beside a river, cooking supper over an open fire, knowing the next day we’d make the border.
“You know how to make Mexican chili?” Stosh inquired.
“Dare I ask?”
“Stick an ice cube up his keister.”
“I don’t get it—too subtle.”
“My old man, the world’s greatest bohunk wit, shared that with me when I told him we were going to Mexico. He suggested we could save ourselves some serious time and money by just walking along Twenty-sixth Street and watching the beaners paint their houses orange and purple.”
“What’s he got against a little local color?”
“I was up in my room playing that Sabicas album and he comes in and tells me he’s sick of hearing flamingo guitar.”
“There it is: the man hates bright colors.”
Stosh shook his head pessimistically. “These beat-out cop sickles wouldn’t make it to Indiana, ese,” he said. “Let’s go north to freedom. Get some orchids.”
We took Cermak to the Outer Drive, heading north to freedom along the lake. We hadn’t spent much time on the North Side until last fall, when, aimlessly cruising, we’d come upon the filigreed, illuminated dome of the Baha’i Temple rising, like a vision from The Arabian Nights, incongruously over the dark, suburban trees of Wilmette.
We were equally amazed by its incongruity and the fact that we’d never heard of the temple. It was as if, like everyone in Chicago, we knew about Sox Park, Wrigley Field, and the stockyards, but had failed to take notice of the Taj Mahal. Our amazement still hadn’t worn off, so Baha’i became a destination, enough of a reason in itself for us to jump in the car and head north.
“I think I’ve become a Baha’i,” I’d announced one night when Stosh, Angel, and I circled through the terraced gardens surrounding the temple. “Maybe I’ve always been one and didn’t know it.”
“How come, if they’re so interested in universal brotherhood, they didn’t build the temple on the South Side, where there’s a little more ethnic diversity, not to mention good old-fashioned all-American race wars?” Angel asked. “It would look great sprayed with gang graffiti, rising out of the projects on Twenty-sixth.”
Later, he painted a picture of the temple’s simple interior: spiritual light streaming onto a basketball court where a couple guys in gang colors were shooting baskets at a hoop attached to a cross while a freight train disappeared Magritte-like into a portal. The painting, along with the nightscapes which made the mills in South Chicago look like travel posters for the Inferno, became part of the portfolio that won Angel a scholarship to the Art Institute.
The North Side felt almost like another city, one zoned with residential streets in mind, rather than factories and truck docks. It wasn’t fragmented by demolished blocks of urban renewal and stitched together by railroad tracks. Glassy high-rises, courtyard apartment buildings, and elegant hotels overlooked the parks, beaches, and indigo lake.
Off Bryn Mawr we always watched for one hotel in particular, with coral roof tiles and matching windowsills. We didn’t know its name, but it looked like something from some more glamorous past, the twenties, maybe.
“A perfect place for an affair between a mysterious, beautiful, very rich older woman of exquisite taste and a young, gifted artist,” Angel had observed.
“A young artist with a nose like a hose covered in zits and a beard that looks like he’s Krazy-Glued hair from his rectum onto his chin?” Stosh inquired.
“An artist who in a fit of jealous madness cuts off a piece of his hose-nose and then paints a portrait of himself with a huge bandage on what’s left of his prehensile beezer?” I added.
“I should have known better than to bring up something romantic in the company of those warped by Catholic education,” Angel said.
This time, as we passed the coral hotel, Stosh looked at me and started laughing.
“That’s where you should of taken Bus Girl after the prom,” he said, “instead of taking her—” He tried repeatedly to finish his sentence but couldn’t without breaking up. “Instead of taking her to fucking Shit Creek,” he finally managed to spit out. “Whatever possessed you to take her down to Shit Creek on prom night? You are the last of the great romantics!” He was beating the steering wheel, driving in a way that made it feel as if the car was propelled by his laughter.
I gazed out the window and watched the harbors and beaches whiz by. Sailboats staked out the horizon. A skywriter doodled across blue sky. We were on the inner lane doing sixty, and I leaned out squinting against the cool rush of wind. I could smell the lake and the suntan lotion from thousands of opened tubes and, within the boom of traffic, could hear what sounded like snatches of the same Top Forty song blaring from a blur of radios. For a fleeting moment it sounded like the lost, elusive dream melody of Laurel’s song, and I wondered what it would be like to be standing at a coral-silled window stories up gazing down on the patchwork of beach blankets and press of bare bodies. A woman would be standing beside me, her hair up, but it wasn’t Laurel Levanto. It wasn’t anyone I knew yet. Out of nowhere the thought occurred to me that the person I was at this moment in the speeding Merc wasn’t ready for that hotel room either.
“Teeming with peons out there today,” Stosh was saying. He swerved into the next lane, the cab behind honking. The lane we’d been in was stalled behind a rusted station wagon full of kids, smoke spewing from its open hood. Their father, a black guy who’d taken off his shirt and wrapped it around his hand, seemed to be doing a sort of dance, hopping toward the radiator cap, giving it a twist, hopping away.
“Poor joker,” I commented.
“Oh, no! Did you have to admit to noticing that? Did we stop to help our fellow man? No. Now you’ve done it, cabrón.”
“W
hat?”
“Attracted the attention of the Immortals. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport.’” That was another of Stosh’s favorite lines. He’d memorized it from King Lear, the other play we’d had to read in senior year.
“The car’s running fine.”
“Holy shit! He didn’t mean it,” Stosh screamed at the heavens. “He knows not what he speaks. Give us a break just this once. All we want to do is pick a few measly fucken orchids.”
“You’re sure these orchids are even there?” I asked. “I hope this isn’t going to be another wild-goose chase like seeking the dawn.”
“The dawn! You’re going to bring that up? Orchids, I tell you. After shelling out fifteen bucks for my promster corsage, I know orchids when I see them—they’re a kind of obscene orchid color, like they’re exposing their privates. Don’t you start molesting them either. You look like an orchid fucker to me, hummingbird dick.”
“I hate it when you call me that.”
“Hummingbird penis! Hummingbird penis!”
“That’s better. I just don’t want to be involved in another fiasco like the boat ride.”
“First the dawn and now you have to bring up the boat ride. Pretty low. I thought we’d agreed never to speak of it. You were the rectum who wanted to go on the boat ride as I remember. I was hesitating.”
“He who hesitates is lost.”
“Very profound.”
I could tell from the way Stosh’s ears flushed that even kidding about the boat ride still bothered him. He’d learned to control his quick temper, but the blood still rushed up his neck whenever he felt his dignity threatened. After he won the CYO championship, his dignity, at least at St. Augustine High, didn’t get threatened too often. People felt that, even if he wanted to, it was nearly impossible for Stosh to back down.
He looked like a boxer. Partly it was the way he carried himself. I could easily outrun him, but he was lighter on his feet, better balanced. Where his nose had been broken, a slight ridge remained, which gave him a profile off a Roman coin. His usual shadow of stubble highlighted a thin scar along his jawline from a fight on a CTA bus in freshman year when, wearing the colors of the Ambros, a gang he’d belonged to for a while, he’d been slashed. His forearms, one of them still tattooed with the pachuco cross from his brief gang membership, were scarred from fending off the knife in the same fight. He’d carried a switchblade ever since.