The Old Neighborhood

by Bill Hillmann

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said.

  That’s what I wanted someone to do for Da now. I wanted them to snap the strings that held him tight to that hospital bed and cut the cancer out of his lungs and his throat and his brain. But no one did, and he died on a hospital bed at Mount Sinai.

  •

  WE ALL KNEW LIL PAT was a junky. His girlfriend, Angie, one-upped him by being a junky and a whore. He wasn’t her pimp, exactly, but he did get high off her hustle. He had a lot a ways to score brown. He was notorious for robbing drug dealers, but the first one didn’t go so well. He was driving in his red Ford Escort GT strung-out on a three-month supply of fifty-milligram Percocet, which he ate in two weeks. He hadn’t shit in eleven days and had grown a low-slung shit-baby—a large lump of backed-up fecal matter that rose from his pelvis and dissipated at his belly button. He ate when he was high on anything; that deep thriving hunger never satiated. He’d just come home and raid the fridge, but he’d been so high he’d forgotten about laxatives. Lil Pat carried a little, black, snub-nosed .38 he’d grabbed off Fat Buck the night before. He rolled to the tip at Granville Ave. and Winthrop Ave., pulled over, and this teenage black kid in a black bomber jacket stepped up to his window, grinning.

  “Whatchu need?” the kid asked.

  Lil Pat trembled. He hadn’t slept in two days, but he had enough presence of mind to wait until the kid got close. Then, he reached out, snatched the kid’s coat collar, and yanked him in through the window. With the other hand, Lil Pat brought the revolver to the kid’s temple and said, “Gimmy.”

  The kid squealed and tried to twist away, but Lil Pat held tight. Suddenly, the kid tossed a roll of money in the window. It flopped in a cup holder.

  “Not that—the China white you been running around here.”

  The kid hesitated. Lil Pat grimaced and cocked the hammer. The kid threw in three little folded-up squares of duct tape, and they landed on the passenger seat. Just then, the front windshield splattered. A thousand tiny cracks splintered across its width. The glass was white at the center where the tip of the metal bat punctured it. Another dude in a bomber jacket yanked and twisted the bat to break it free. Thin little shards clattered atop the tan dashboard.

  Lil Pat let go of the kid. He tried to aim the revolver and shot outward through the windshield. The bullet burst a quarter-sized hole through the spider-webbed glass. The bat tugged free as Lil Pat floored it down Winthrop. The wad of cash unfurled and flapped around the center console in the breeze as the Ford knifed through the canyon of red-brick high-rises. Feet pattered at his back. Then, three shots rang out, long and clear, into the daylight.

  He drove the Ford around with the windshield like that for three days until he totaled it, high, into the iron pier of a railroad underpass. He fled the scene and reported it stolen the next day.

  He still had other less-messy ways to score—ways he’d manage when he was still buzzin’ and feeling good. My Grandma was so heartbroken over losing Da, and she loved Lil Pat so much. She’d been kind of a surrogate mother to him in the early days when Ma was just a 14-year-old girl with an infant. I guess Gram was just lonely too. Terribly lonely and sad.

  Lil Pat would go over there on cloud nine, take out the trash, and dazzle her with bullcrap about the new job he had. All the while, he stole anything he could get his hands on—cash, jewelry, checks. He had a knack for forging signatures and hustling currency exchanges and bank tellers. Since he had Dad’s exact name, he could go to the bank with forged checks, and because Dad had an account, Lil Pat could cash ’em. But after a while, sadly and sickly, Gram started playing into it. They call it “enabling,” and old people are almost always the perpetrators. So damned lonely, having so much love to give, wanting to help their son or grandson or nephew, they plop cash in their hands so they can go buy heroin, or crack, or gamble. It’s a sick world. I held a lot of animosity towards her about what she’d done, or helped Lil Pat do to himself, years later when I began to understand it all. But in the end, now, today, I can’t. They were just two lost people way, way down on their luck. Even ten, fifteen years after Da was gone, she couldn’t talk about him without bursting into tears. “Like a wildfire, Joey. I loved him like a wildfire.”

  •

  COPS AND ROBBERS, right. It’s a fun game. Both sides have their heroes, both their villains. But I never truly wanted to play the villain. I don’t know that anyone does. I always knew Lil Pat was a robber but not a villain. But when the heroin took him, he was the villain—the true villain—in all ways. Though, then, I always allowed that he be detached from himself when he was strung-out. That it wasn’t him who did those things. It was the drugs. There was solace in that, I guess, but it didn’t stop the things he did.

  •

  THERE WAS A NICKEL-PLATED .45 semi-automatic that sat in a sealed plastic bag on a shelf down in the basement evidence room at Chicago Police headquarters for a decade. It was flagged for release. It never got picked up.

  I was home sick from school. Or, in other words, Ma got tired of me whining that I was sick at the kitchen table that morning and let me stay home. This was something the old man woulda never put up with, but since he left for work before sunrise, it wasn’t a problem.

  It was around lunch time, and I’d just finished eating a bowl of Oodles of Noodles. Ma had cooked it up just the way I like it—with an egg dropped in. I headed down the long hallway from the kitchen on my way back upstairs to read my comic books when the front door slowly creaked open. It was always dark there by the door, and the windowless landing at the bottom of the stairs created a gray haze that hung there in the day with the lights out. Lil Pat stuck his head in as the door creaked opened. His eyes bugged out. His usually well-kempt goatee and mustache had grown into an uneven, stubbly beard. Scratches ran down along his cheeks, fingernail thick. He peered over my head as he slowly eased the screen door shut behind him. He glanced down at me with a false smirk and raised his index finger to his lips. His massive body trembled under his tattered, three-quarter-length leather coat, and the smell of burnt fingertips and ammonia swelled into the room with him. Suddenly, all the things my parents had said to me over the past few weeks flooded into my head: Don’t go anywhere with Pat. If you see Pat, run home. Years later, I’d find out he’d threatened to kidnap me if my parents got between him and Grandma’s money. I found this out when he started to make those same threats to my nieces and nephews, but by then, I was grown up and a different person.

  He left the door cracked open and tip-toed up the stairs. I didn’t know what to do. I walked back into the yellow-tiled walls of the kitchen where Ma stirred a pot of macaroni. I walked up behind her. The sharp smell of melted-butter mixed with cheddar cheese. I stared at her back as she dug the large wooden spoon into the pot. She must have felt my eyes on her because she stopped and turned around to face me.

  “What is it, honey,” she asked, placing her hands on the small of her back. Her heavy curves slumped.

  I couldn’t talk. I just slowly raised my head and looked up at the ceiling where Lil Pat’s steps creaked.

  “What is it?” She repeated. She stepped toward me and undid the strings of her faded-red apron, then glanced up at the ceiling.

  The sound of metal sliding across metal and then a sharp click cut through racket of the babysitting kids in the back yard. It was my father’s .45mm semi-automatic—the same .45 Dad’d used to make a statement years before. There was this junky that lived in an apartment at the end of the block named Gabriel. He was a mean, skinny Cuban with bushy eyebrows, a mustache, and black eyes. Gabriel was a known burglar operating in the neighborhood—he had to pay for his fix somehow. He’d even been caught a couple times, but it didn’t deter him.

  One night, someone busted out our first floor back window. The crashing glass triggered an instant nightmare in my sleeping mind. I screamed so loud that my parents were sure it was the second floor window that I sle
pt under that’d broken. Sure that they’d find me, five-years-old with glass dug into my skin. But I was safe, and whoever’d broken the window was gone.

  The next night, my Dad saw Gabriel on his way up our block like nothing’d happened, and he stomped towards him. Dad’s hands always curled like he was crumbling wads of paper when he was getting ready to do something. Just as he was about to pass Gabriel, Dad suddenly dipped his weight downward. Then, he drove his wide, heavy fist up into Gabriel’s jaw with all his might. Gabriel’s molars crunched shut with a sharp crack. The force lifted Gabriel just off the ground. His feet levitated just off the ground. His neck stretched like he was hung from an invisible wire. Then, Gabriel descended. His body crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut. Gabriel’s head cracked the sidewalk slab with a hollow pop. He lay flat and motionless on the sidewalk.

  My father pulled out the .45 and kneeled down over Gabriel’s body. He slid the length of the barrel into Gabriel’s gaping mouth to wake him up. Then my father explained to him, in no uncertain terms, that he wouldn’t be burglarizing homes in the neighborhood anymore. After that, Gabriel disappeared from the block, and the burglaries stopped—for a while anyway.

  Ma hurried towards the front door. She dragged her thick, varicose-veined leg under her. Lil Pat rumbled down the stairs. As Ma got to the door, she closed it. She locked all three locks and the chain bolt, then pressed her back to the white-painted wood. I followed her. My betrayal of my brother and fear for my mother churned in my chest. He slowed as he neared the bottom steps and gripped the oak railing. All the family pictures hung just behind him on the staircase wall. They dated back to when Lil Pat was a chipped-tooth boy in the ’70s. He hadn’t gotten along with her even then.

  He stared at her. His eyes widened, and the whites glistened behind the bulged, red veins. His movements were brittle, like taut cords ran through his entire body.

  “Get out the way, Ma,” he warned.

  “Patrick Charles,” she said, her voice thundering with fear and outrage. “What are you doing with your father’s gun?”

  He stepped down the last few steps to the landing.

  “Get out the way,” he said, flatly, and tilted his head to the side.

  “No, Pat. This has to stop,” she pleaded. Her body quivered.

  “Get the fuck outta the way!” he yelled. “I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out, BITCH!”

  He twisted and pulled the .45 from his waistband. Then, he extended and pointed it directly in her face. It was like the bottom tip of my crucifix morphed into a point. It elongated, bent, and pierced my skin. Then, it sank deep into my heart and set like a hook. I clutched my chest. She bowed her head and looked away but didn’t move from the door.

  “Pat,” I said, breathless.

  Lil Pat turned and looked at me. The pistol trembled. All his teeth were showing—his face flexed. I leaned my back against the wall in the hallway and slid down it slowly. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Confusion swept over his face.

  “Naw, Joey, no,” He said, lowering the gun. “I wasn’t gonna do it… I’m… I’m sorry.”

  Then, he looked back at Ma. He dug his shoulder into her and knocked her out of the way. Then, he undid the locks as she grabbed at his wrist and hand. He swung the door open and smashed her into the wall with it. The rubber band snapped in her ponytail, and slices of her jet-black hair fell over her face. He thundered down the front steps and was gone.

  She shut the door and locked it, taking heaving breaths. And that wasn’t the last time there’d be a gun pointed at someone I loved.

  •

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER, they busted Lil Pat for armed robbery. Nearly all the heroin dealers on the North Side refused to sell to him, and many had even bulked up security just in case Lil Pat and Fat Buck tried to stick them up again. So, Lil Pat went pharmaceutical. He’d managed to get several high-dosage pain prescriptions, and since the union was still kicking out for insurance, he was getting high almost for free. When the insurance ran out, Lil Pat got strung-out. He went into the pharmacy with the .45 and had them hand over several hundred dollars worth of Oxycontin. He even put the .45 under a pregnant woman’s maternity dress to encourage the pharmacist to hurry up. She was a Filipino woman—mid-twenties, with that flushed glow of a soon-to-be mother. She was eight-to-nine months, with her round belly just hovering above that cold-metal .45 pointed up at that life yet to take a breath.

  They I.D.’d him easy. There was no way out of it. The cops wanted him bad because of the pregnant lady thing, and they came to the house looking for him. I remember the heavy banging at the door and the officers pouring in with a search warrant. Their hands clasped on their police issue 9s. Officer O’Riley showed up. He frowned—his gray-speckled mustache hung over his top lip. He stepped through the front door slowly, and his Mick-red face bowed. The cops left after the house was searched, and I sat at the top of the stairs and listened to O’Riley talk with my father. I’ll never forget my father’s cracked voice—the voice of a broken man without the choice of giving in.

  “He needs help,” my father said. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “There’s nothing you can do, Pat,” Officer O’Riley said. “He’s gotta face the music on this one.”

  Later that night, the phone rang, and I heard my father’s voice downstairs. I got up and walked to the top of the landing and listened to my father convince Lil Pat to put the .45 in a dumpster behind the Jewel on Ashland. Afterward, Dad called the cops and told them where they could find the gun. Then, later, it was Lil Pat again. I listened as my father convinced him to turn himself in. He ended up getting sent for six years.

  It’s a strange thing to walk around the neighborhood with everybody knowing your brother’s in the Pen. The clean part of the neighborhood looks at you like you’re trash and expects you to be bad. I’d be playing with kids like normal when their mothers would call them in. It got so they didn’t come ask me to play ball out behind St. Greg’s gym no more. I remember the last time I came around to see the clean kids. I saw Mike Thompson walk out his front door with a mitt and bat, and I rode up to him and asked if he was gonna play a game and if I could come. Mrs. Thompson appeared at his front door and called him in. He shrugged and said sorry. I remember how after he passed her inside she stood at the screen door looking at me a long time. Not saying nothing, but saying everything with her frowning bitter face… My son will not play with the likes of you. Rifts swelled between me and clean kids. I started to hate them. At the same time, the dark part of the neighborhood looks at you with respect. Guys hanging out and sipping beers on front porches would say things like, “Ohh dat’s lil Walsh, Patty’s little brother,” then give me a sip of their beer while they asked how Lil Pat was doing in there. And the bad kids—the kinds with families just like yours—seem to hang around ya more ’cause the clean part looks at them the same way. So it gets to the point that you do bad shit ’cause it’s what the clean part wants. So they know they are nothing like you, and so you know you are nothing like them.

  PART TWO

  ADOLESCENCE

  CHAPTER 9

  SIMON

  THEY KILLED SY over a stereo. Sounds petty, I know. It was.

  This gang called the PG3s sprouted up a few blocks north of us around Granville and Clark. They mainly hung out around Hayt Elementary School’s playground, which had this big asphalt baseball diamond with one of those pitched-roof field houses in the corner. The park was encircled by a tall chain-link fence. They were a mixed bag—whites, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and black’s. They were mostly teenagers; there were no real old-school heads ‘cause they just didn’t have any history. They were renegades, meaning they didn’t take sides in the huge rift between street gangs in Chicago known as the Nations. Back then, nearly all the individual gangs in the city fell under alliance with either the Folks Nation or the Peoples Nation. Endless wars raged between them. Being on your own
like that in a big city is a difficult thing. It makes you an easy target for both sides, and as result, in the few years of their existence, the PG3s had become pretty ruthless.

  One of the big problems with not being part of a Nation was the lack of access to quality drugs. The heroin and cocaine the PG3s did get a hold of was stomped on vigorously, so by the time they tried to bag it and sell it, even hungriest junkies and crackheads were sticking their noses up at it.

  Even their weed was bunk.

  Sy had gotten hold of a quarter-pound of kind bud from some Outlaws—this big biker crew from McCook out in the suburbs. Like I said, Sy just knew everybody. He worked part-time at a record store and sold the bud to help pay rent. He’d moved into this little second-floor apartment across from the hospital on Hollywood.

  I witnessed the whole thing go down in stages, but nothing could have told me what was coming. It was like watching a bad car wreck in slow motion when the only thing you should do, you can’t, which is close your eyes.

  •

  WHEN I WAS A KID, Andersonville was only considered the shopping district—that strip of Swedish shops along Clark before it hit Ashland. What solidified this for me and all the rest of us was the Edgewater Hospital, which sat at Ashland and Hollywood. It was this towering tan concrete structure that loomed high and wide like a monolith. You could see it from just about anywhere in our little nook of Edgewater. It had an eerie omnipresence, like it was following us. Just above the pitched roofs and between the narrow gangways, there it was, always. We’d all been in that ER at least once with broken bones, cuts that needed stitches, and worse. Many of us had been born there, and more than a few of our relatives had died inside those ominous, concrete walls. The raw, divergent power of that monolith drew us kids like a magnet.