Sacred City

by Theodore C. Van Alst

  —SIMON POKAGON, “THE FUTURE OF THE RED MAN”

  “Leave the beer. That’ll pay part of your asshole tax.”

  Waves crash and roar, green and grey on the shores of Lake Michigan on the North Side of Chicago. North Side, best side, land of my birth. There’s no other place I’d rather be, and my bones tell me so. Warmth like morphine heat buzzes through my frame, throbs up through my skin, pops out and hugs my skinny ass and tells me it’s going to be okay, while its gold light washes out over my wide eyes and death is so very far away.

  Shitty, but not sloppy drunk, we weave through weathered benches and garbage-strewn dunes, closed hotdog shacks, and piles of Park District canoes, making our way south, a warm wind from the west running into the cold breeze off the lake in the purple-black sky right above us. There’s no rain, but it feels like thunder pours down on our heads; long hair, curly hair, afros, and grown-out summer baldy-sours all bristle with the wild static in the air. Ball lightning flares out blue and white in silent pops over the dark horizon to the east, its orange echoes mocking my ears, waiting for the thunder that still never comes.

  Growing up by the lake has affected me my whole life. If I don’t live by, can’t walk to or see big water, I feel it every day. Its lack makes me morose and mopey and maladjusted. The bones don’t lie. I even come down here in the winter; the frozen waves on the breakers and the moaning of the ice along the shore speak to me in ways that give me place, tell me I’m home. On this late summer night, I’m happy to be alive, though I’m not sure if it’s the beach or my set—my fam, or the post-fight buzz—but nights like this, it doesn’t matter either way.

  We’re heading toward Farwell Pier. We can see shadows out there night fishing, lanterns and little bonfires built in hibachis and homemade grills lighting the black water and framing their bent bodies and old man fishing gear in a flickering yellow glow. Sometimes we trade beers, sometimes joints, for whatever they’ve caught and cooked. Usually perch, but sometimes coho, and smelt in the spring. We shoot the shit, learning old guy jokes and how we shouldn’t fish with M-80s and nets, cause that ain’t fair.

  Tonight, we’re generous, handing out weed and beers, full of our own jokes and glow, talking shit and sharing old stories. We’re getting back from a humbug with some Latin Kings at Leone Beach, a serious threat to our extended territory, one we were fortuitously and fucking happy to have been at. Six Coronas and about fifteen of us Royals. We all like the water and the sand, going to the beach, so yeah, that worked out. It was kind of nice, this old school humbug. Folks was packing, but no one drew up. Just some straight ass-beating. Them’s the breaks. No particular hate, just their bad timing. It’s happened to us, and this time it happened to them.

  So yeah, we were fired up, full of that youthful sauce that pulls up genuine smiles, true joy, love maybe even, that space created with your boys when you can imagine nothing really bad has happened, and everything really good is possible. Those maybe two moments you get growing up, the ones that slip past you before you have a chance to clock them for what they are. Those two moments would have to wait, though, because I was about to have one of those other kinds of moments.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Just give us the beer and walk away,” I say.

  I had wandered away from the pier into one of the little dunes that sprung up around Pratt Ave. beach. I was thinking about taking a piss, and a few of the peewees had followed along behind me, anxious to keep talking, jostling for position, trying to one-up their warlord, thoughts of leadership dancing in their heads. I needed to take a leak, so I kept walking farther into the beach grass and scrubby buckthorns.

  That’s when I hear a group of guys talking about college or some shit.

  I listen as I look for a place to piss, one ear vaguely cocked toward the peewees telling me how down they were for the Nation, and the other sifting through the college-boy yow.

  After thirty seconds or so I realize I know these guys. I had gone to grammar school and then high school with them.

  Or been at the same high school, since once we got there they didn’t, wouldn’t, talk to me, acted like they had never seen me in their life. And after I dropped out, well, whatever.

  I walk out between a couple of bushes and there they are, a little anxiety ridden, glancing around, unsure if they should plant it there and party or not.

  I keep that vibe going for them.

  “Hey,” I continue.

  “Oh, wow. It’s you,” one of them says. Not sure which one, but who gives a fuck.

  “Yeah. It’s me. Not sure what you’re doing here, but like I said, just leave the beer and we’re good.”

  “What? We were—”

  “—going to leave the beer,” I finish for him.

  “Come on, Teddy. It’s not like that,” he says.

  “Oh, but it is,” I say, looking around at the half-dozen assholes who had dried up out of my life, their faces even now turning to dust in front of my eyes.

  Three and a half years or so run between us like a VHS on fast forward. I watch it play out on his face, his college-bound senses undulled for the moment, my ignored humanity lurching back into his life for this minute or two, a small flicker in his eye registering to me that there was at least the tiniest recognition that I was once his friend. I’m glad to see it. It makes this encounter all the sweeter. The only improvement would be if—never mind, it was happening. Four or five of my boys roll up, on their way to get more beer over at the liquor store on Sheridan Road.

  “What’s up, Folks?” Jimmy3 asks. “Do you know these pussies?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t.”

  “They trespassing?” he asks.

  “I do believe they are,” I say.

  “Gotta pay a toll, then,” Jimmy2 says.

  “A tax,” I say. “It’s a tax, Jimmy.”

  “Sure, Midget. You’re so uptight sometimes,” Jimmy2 says.

  “Yeah, bro,” Jimmy3 says. “True.”

  “You wanna say ‘pedantic’ there, homes?” I say.

  “Whatever,” the Jimmys say.

  “In this case, it’s an asshole tax,” I say.

  They laugh a little.

  “Sure,” Jimmy2 says. “An asshole tax. Whatever you gotta do.”

  “So, assholes,” Jimmy1 says, “you got the tax?”

  One of the college boys looks at me, expectantly or pathetically, I ain’t judging.

  “Well, do you?” I ask.

  “Yeah, sure, Teddy,” he says.

  “Good for you,” I say. “Pay the man.”

  They hand two cases of Old Style tallboys over to the Jimmys.

  “See? Was that so hard?” I ask.

  Heads down, they walk out of the scrub and grass in a sad-ass college-boy processional.

  My glow flares a little brighter.

  Waves crash and roar, crash and roar.

  The thunders hug me in a way I’ll love for the rest of my days.

  5.WHERE’S THE SUNSHINE?

  They’re not going to get me.

  —JOHN DILLINGER

  I’m trying to get out the door of this joint with some spicy chicken and these rice and beans, but then I really look at the person who just took my order and my money and I see a yellow-haired girl with “DORITOS” tattooed across her pale, thin wrist. Holy shit they like to smoke weed in this town.

  The tattoo thing is weird. When I was a kid, not too many people had tattoos. All right, really, only three kinds of people—carnies, ex-cons, and gangbangers. That’s it. So, if you committed to tattoos early on and you didn’t grow up next to a freak show, okay, to the official freak show, then you were a crook of some kind or another. But now, everyone has tattoos. It’s kind of embarrassing, really.

  I look down at my own tattooed hands, the ones I thought would never live past thirty (because who the fuck would tattoo their hands for christ’s sake? Most tattooists wouldn’t touch your hands or face back in the day), and I think about my old limo
-driver friend Vassily.

  Vassily and me are friends. We didn’t start out that way, sure, but it’s okay. He’s a linguist, a professor who took the Russians up on their détente-inflected offer to leave the Soviet Union and eventually settled in West Rogers Park, somewhere near (I always picture him there, anyway) the sign that read “Save Soviet Jewry” by Devon Avenue, except here in the States, instead of teaching bored rich kids how to diagram sentences in Old Norse or whatever, he drives a limo. Once he was just my driver for a night in Chicago, took me where I needed to go and made me laugh. These days, though, we hang out and shit, drive around in his limo together. I still like to sit in the back sometimes. He usually doesn’t care when I do and uses the opportunity to smoke much weed, which is Vassily’s thing, but not mine. Whatever.

  This Tuesday, though, he seems super high, and I’m a little worried, even for him. We’re sitting in the parking lot of a crappy hamburger place on the North Side, White Castle or Rally’s or something, anyway, on one of Chicago’s sensible streets, the ones that angle out like spokes from downtown. Elston, Milwaukee, Archer, Ogden, all of those streets started out as “Indian Trails,” and whether they’re Potawatomi or Illinois or Miami, they’re the best way to get around town quick. I’m in the back seat drinking beers and he’s up front, coughing from the cheap paper he rolls his joints with and brushing the floating ash off his bargain black suit coat.

  “Hey, Vassily. You hungry, man?” I say, trying to cut through his buzz a little. I want to buy my friend lunch.

  “This trick fucking question you are asking,” he says. “I am from Soviet fucking Union, man. I stand in line one time six fucking days for a molded grape. Yes. Vassily is hungry, jackass greasy face Injun sometime best friend. But, this shit, this ‘hamburger’ inside roach motel here not even edible for poor Vassily ugly fuck dog back in Odessa.”

  Guess he’s not that high, just super pensive. “Deep Thoughts with Vassily.” I shudder a little.

  I laugh and say, “Head up Elston. Let’s go eat for real then.”

  “Up Elston? To where fucking Polacks live? So Vassily can die young and beautiful? Why TeddyBear so mean poor Vassily? Have only tried to be friend, but no, it is now death for Vassily. Death by jealous Polack hand. Such sad ending.”

  “No. It’s a hillbilly place.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t just say so?”

  We drive slow, take it easy. The sights slide by, and we don’t talk, just take it all in. The neighborhoods go from a little grimy to a lot of dull, postwar construction in all its utilitarian glory that rages up and down blocks full of delis with potato sausage–packed windows and bars swinging Zimne Piwo Old Style signs out front. We make a quick right after about fifteen minutes of travel agencies and Western Unions splashed in Polish and Spanish that eventually fade back into English and park this big black Lincoln kind of in the bus stop in front of our destination, a little big-windowed place that sits at the end of one of those weird-angled corner buildings. Vassily hangs the checkerboard hatband from a cop hat off the rearview mirror and locks the door. “Fuck it,” he tells me. “My sister doesn’t blow this fat married pig in squad car on last day of each month so that Vassily can pay for parking.”

  We look around, eyes adjusting from the greyed-out but still-bright snowbanks and the not-as-weak-as-you’d-think winter sun. The floor is that so-small white six-sided tile with the black grout, and there’s fake spoiled-pudding-colored paneling under the counter where seven or eight red vinyl stools sag under the sad and solid weight of a thousand Chicago sausage-bred asses, and there’s paneling on the walls above the booth where we sit, and it runs down the wall into the hall and darkens the bathrooms and the stock room but no, it’s all just old brown wood-grained contact paper peeling under the haze of the shitty fluorescent lights that always give me a headache so I swallow something out of my change pocket to fight that ahead of time and I slouch into the booth and struggle out of the coat I should’ve taken off when I was still standing. Vassily looks at me and just shakes his head.

  “For smart guy sometimes make dumb decision, Feo.”

  “I know, man. One of those days.”

  “Talk to Vassily.”

  “Hold on. Here comes the waitress.”

  “Waitress? All these fucking chicks you call ‘waitress’ have hand tattoo like harden Moscow criminal, man. What the fuck kind place taking Vassily to? Thought Vassily and Feodor have agreement. Vassily drive slow around corner so Teddy not spill horrible malt beverage, and Vassily not perish by fist of treacherous American redneck girl.”

  “Shit. They won’t hurt you. You won’t die today,” I say.

  “The ‘waitress’ girls?” Vassily makes dramatic quote marks in the air with his oddly scarred hands when he says “waitress.” “Vassily not afraid of ‘waitress’ (again with the quotes) in this joint. Vassily afraid of place in back that yell around and make ‘food’ (he loves an air quote) for unsuspecting customer.”

  “Come on, Vassily. Don’t be a dick. They have jelly omelets on the menu, and they deep fry most of the shit they serve. Or grill the piss right out of it. You ever have scrambled eggs and fried bologna?”

  “Only when first come to this deprive capitalist funhouse and forced to, like some ill-behave dog. Why Teddy eat like strange kind wild hillbilly?”

  “You better hush that pretty mouth of yours, Vassily,” I say. “Big Verdell gone come out from behind the counter and fill it with something you might not like.”

  “Stop salty talking, Feodor writer asshole. Vassily not comfortable with easy American sex conversation. Have no boundary this country.”

  “Hahahaha. Fuck you, Vassily. How’s that?”

  “Asshole.”

  “Okay. Here she is. Knock it off.”

  It’s Misty. She eyes us up. Appears to be in the mood for zero shit. I look over at Vassily, duck lip it, and roll my eyes up and over. He shakes his head a little. I worry about this guy’s social capabilities.

  “Uh, Vassily have eggs, but no goddamn bologna. Toast bread. Coffee.”

  “Sweetie,” the waitress says, “I don’t know who the hell Vassily is, but that ain’t him across from you and you’re gonna have to speak English if you want me to put in an order for you.”

  I look in her face, maybe for a beat too long. Wow. What a life. I say, “Sorry about that. He’s a little foolish.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Sorry about the cussing, then.”

  “No worries, dear,” I say. “Can you give us a few more minutes? And a couple of coffees?”

  “Sure thing, hon,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”

  Vassily gives me this look.

  “What the fuck does ‘foolish’ mean?” he says. “This mean retard?”

  “No, man. Don’t worry about it,” I say.

  “Oh, Vassily worry about it. Is she some kind strange Polack? One having weird American hillbilly accent? Vassily felt very judged. Is not comfortable. Probably two minute until giant Stanislaus brother come, make Uki jelly from poor Vassily organs.”

  “This ‘not comfortable’ thing,” I say (yeah, full air quotes). “You’re like a delicate flower, Vassily. What the fuck has happened to you?”

  “Did you see her have burn on hand like has been used for ashtray. This bullshit, I say, because beautiful flower tattoo now burnt. Did Teddy not see this? Mr. Writer, Mr. Observant?”

  “I told you I’m not a writer, man. You’re just trying to make some shitty Russian connections with your man Dostoevsky because my first name is Theodore, not Feodor. And you know I’m a Gogol fan anyway, so knock it off.”

  “This Gogol thing, weak, Feo. This Overcoat love you have, not good. Short story for weakling. Men write novel, not tiny cute story.”

  For the second time in about five minutes I say, “Fuck you, Vassily.”

  Vassily must’ve scared her off, or it’s time for a shift change, because all of a sudden we’re gonna get a new waitress. I see her from behind at first, loo
king at Misty pointing over at us and shaking her head. The new girl, I wonder if it’s that one waitress I had last time I was here. That waitress had had an accident, one that left her with an eyepatch. On which she had painted a butterfly, a mourning cloak to remind her of the eyelash thing she used to do with her daughter at bedtime. She had been putting on makeup doing that weird thing girls do when they put on makeup, wiping at her eye while pulling down at the lower lid.

  And that’s when the other car hit.

  I know this because I asked her.

  Unlike Vassily, I really have no filter.

  But it’s not her. It’s someone newer, someone else. She heads over to our booth.

  She’s beautiful. Truly beautiful, the woman I always fall for, the one just less than the perfect that can only be made by the Creator, like the single black ten-cut in the beadwork, the one with the fucked-up teeth, not all crooked, but like the canine is trying to mug the lateral incisor, and that number ten tooth just ain’t having it, and when she smiles just right, you can see their enameled struggle going down in a way that makes her absolutely perfect to you. She is that last flower, the one running on Indian time, the bright-pink whorl on the brown-grey rosebush, the one with the coppery leaves and the barky shadow-sketched outline, its last lone bud making it all the more achingly beautiful. The most beautiful. And now she’s here.

  I can’t talk.

  Goddamnit.

  But my eyes can move.

  I look over at Vassily.

  He jumps in:

  “Wait. Do you know this man?”

  She looks at him. Looks at me. I shrink a little further into the booth.

  “Obviously you do not know this great man,” Vassily continues. “He is literary giant, is great writer, is famous. How you not know Feodor?”