The Old Neighborhood

by Bill Hillmann

  Suddenly, I heard this familiar voice and turned. Monteff stood at the mouth of the tunnel in some white jeans. The pleats and creases in the jeans created these mountainous glacier legs that flowed down to his Reebok Pumps. He’d said something funny that I didn’t catch. They laughed. Monteff’s small, bright-white teeth flashed and sent these spiral rays shooting in all directions. He walked up and greeted us with handshakes and toked on the weed smoke.

  Monteff was one of the only black dudes from the Dead-End-Docks who would come over by us to chill. He was just one of those vibrant individuals who can transcend race and cliques and haters. He’d surpass those invisible walls and bring his joyful, melodic vibe along with him. But even he was freaking me out in the state I was in. Monteff always arched his eyebrows up when he was listening to something entertaining. Angel was on one of his perverse, sarcastic ramblings, and it sent Monteff’s eyebrows stretching up higher and higher. Suddenly, they morphed into the shape of the McDonald’s Arches. Then, the tips of his bristly eyebrows melded into the hairline of his trimmed scalp. I was so gripped by it that I couldn’t catch what Angel was saying. Angel’s voice erupted loudly, then twisted into a chortle. Monteff’s eyebrows swelled to form his soft widow’s peak, and his eyeballs yawned wide open and protruded out of their sockets. The light-brown flecks caught in the arc lamp. Man, I really should never smoke weed, especially not kind bud.

  Later, an ambulance roared into the emergency room tunnel. The red-and-blue strobe lit the whole block and struck the full-leaved trees across the street, daylight-bright. A pair of gleaming, phosphorescent-white eyes flashed at me through the leafy branches, then vanished. Angel, Ryan, and Monteff jogged into the alley and up to the ER ramp. I followed, sluggishly.

  The ambulance doors burst open. Urgency distorted the faces of the paramedics. It looked like they were all screaming soundlessly. Then, I realized it was the deafening sirens that were screaming.

  “Damn, that motherfucker got his ass whooped,” Ryan said. A sickness had taken him. Saliva drenched his lips. HIs grimace suddenly elongated until the corners of his lips touched his ears. His crooked teeth wiggled, then suddenly everything warped back to normal. Monteff gawked, then spun away saying, “Ohhhhhhh!” His mouth stretched in a downward “o” like an anteater’s snout.

  I looked at the guy as the stretcher descended from the ambulance. He was an unconscious, teenaged Puerto Rican kid, and the side of his face and head were terribly swollen and pulsing red. There was a large gash that hung open like a flap and ran along the back of his skull with dark blood leaking from it. There were crazy, zigzagging lines etched into his scalp that ran down behind his ears, and I recognized the face, but couldn’t figure out where from. Then, it hit me: he was one of the dudes that stopped by to listen to Sy’s stereo.

  Years later, Rich’d tell me how they’d gotten that guy. We were riding to work in the big box truck he drove for the construction company. Mancow’s Morning Madhouse had enraged him, so he’d shut the radio off. They’d run up into the PG3s’ turf that night and saw Mr. Zigzag walk into a corner store. They waited for him along the wall on the dark side street. When he came out with a big plastic bottle of Diet Coke in his hands, Rich’d stepped up behind him. Then Rich smashed his full glass liter of Budweiser over the back of Mr. Zigzag’s head with the brown paper still wrapped around it. They lumped him up a little when he went down, face-flat on the sidewalk. Then, they jetted the fuck outta there before anybody saw ’em.

  •

  SY HAD A GIRLFRIEND over that way, right off of Granville. That’s how he met them PG3s when they got word he had some flame bud. Sy went over to see his girl that Friday. Word was out that somebody’d burglarized Sy’s place, and that he was sure it was the PG3s who’d done it. The stereo meant a lot to Sy. Music was a big part of his identity. It was his escape from all the trouble he had at home. And he’d saved up a long time to get it. The PG3s didn’t like Sy slandering their names in the street like that, and they had their suspicions of who rode on their boy with the zigzag ’do, so when one of ’em saw that Sy had stopped by his girl’s house, they sent over their shooter—that same little black kid I saw a few days before. Dude went by the name of Spider. They sent him to stick a gun in Sy’s face and tell him to quit with his talking.

  When Sy left his girl’s place, Spider stepped up to him and pulled the 9mm revolver. He held it at his side, just to show him, and told Sy to keep the PG3s out of his vocabulary. Sy had a certain way of seeing things, so he probably looked at that 15-year-old kid and thought Screw all this crap. Probably wanted to talk to him, talk some sense into him. Sy reached for the gun, and Spider lurched back, scared. Pop.

  That same night, Angel, Ryan, and I were down there hangin’ as usual. Friday night was always a big night—a lot of domestics, car accidents, muggings, knifings, old people off their meds and having strokes and breakdowns. I was sitting on the ledge of my sill, elbows propped on my knees, feeling strange. Sewage rambled below the street and echoed up through the catch-basin along the curb. Angel was next to me chomping on a wad of Gonzo Grape Bubblicious and blowing quick, little bubbles that popped and squished. The noise irritated all the tiny hairs inside my earlobe. Angel could annoy a person like no other. I felt sick and dizzy and a little scared as the full, incandescent moon beamed down on us through the hazy, purplish sky.

  “Man, I got a weird feeling about tonight, man,” I said, folding my arms over my chest.

  “Yeah?” Angel replied, furrowing his brow as he continued to pop away.

  “Yeah. Something crazy is gonna happen, man. I can just feel it in my stomach, ya know?”

  “What, like that shit—what do they call it—ESB or somethin’?” Ryan said giggling, as he leaned against the narrow concrete partition between the sills.

  “Man, I don’t know,” I said, then licked my dry lips. “I just want to see if it works. That’s why I told you. What if I’m fucking psychic or something?”

  Angel chortled. “Well, tell me what I’m thinking then.”

  “Ah, either some kinda joke with hermaphrodites in it, or about fucking one ’a those big-booty bitches in the Lowrider magazines.” I grinned widely at him.

  “Shit! He is psychic! Fuck! Watch out what you think around him, Ry. You know, about kissing him and shit like that, ’cause he’ll catch your ass.”

  “Fuck you, you fucking weirdo,” Ryan said, flat and cool.

  An ambulance strolled slowly through the back way with its lights on swirling lazily, but without sirens. We jogged into the alley. The ambulance drivers helped an old bald man out of the back by his arm. His mouth hung open, and his light-blue eyes were lost. He wore red-striped pajamas with a big wet spot at the crotch.

  “Aye, look, he pissed his self!” Angel sighed.

  “Man, that old fucker’s retarded. Look at him,” Ryan said.

  “I pissed my pants?” the old man said, bewildered. His mouth gaped, revealing his blackened bottom row of teeth.

  “Man, we better stop. Big James is gonna come out here, man,” I said as we walked back.

  “I pissed my pants?” Angel mimicked the old man perfectly. “That’s nothing. I shit myself, too!” Angel cocked his head to the side with his crazy eyes wide open and his bottom lip uncurled.

  We were still giggling when the sirens of another ambulance blared onto Hollywood.

  “Told you it was gonna be a crazy night,” I said. We waited at the mouth of the tunnel.

  The ambulance came in hot. Its tires squealed as it rounded the corner, then zoomed into the tunnel. An excitement rushed up, then froze like icicles in my stomach.

  The ambulance came to a screeching halt. The driver lunged out, and the one in back leapt down from the back doors. They extracted the stretcher swiftly. Their faces were fierce and panic-stricken. A young doctor jogged down the ER ramp as we stepped up. Big James emerged. I couldn’t see at first because of the commotion.
Big James pushed us back in his slow, powerful way with the back of his arm. Angel squeezed up in front.

  “Ahhhh, dat guy’s dead!” Angel said in a silly voice. “Look at him, his brains are leaking out.” He turned and walked away with a sick smile. “Yeah, we got a 109: oil leak out of skull.” He spoke into an invisible radio attached to his shirt collar.

  I chuckled uneasily as I fought my way up to see, and then I saw the face, the beard all wet and dark. The red-soaked hair had familiar, greasy, dirty-blond strands at the edges. The mangled face had dark-red blood smeared all over it. My heart jumped along with my entire body. I turned to run, then turned back to look again. The long hair, the beard, tufts of sinew protruded from the gaping wound in the eye socket. There was blood and a darker, thicker mucus oozing up like tar. I muffled a scream with my palm, spun, and sprinted away. I could hear the ambulance driver speaking with the ER doctor as they pushed him up the ramp: “One round through the left orbital. No exit.”

  “Oh, shit,” Ryan yelled. “Dude got shot in the head!”

  I ran as fast as I could. A thousand things soared through my head. I ran home. When I got inside, I bounded stairs to Rich’s room and tried the doorknob. It was locked. I banged hard and fast on the thin, hollow wood. The sound thundered over the heavy metal music blaring inside.

  “Rich!” I screamed. “Rich!” The emotion poured in a squealing sway.

  The door ripped open.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” Rich said, glaring down at me.

  “It’s Sy!”

  “What?”

  “It’s Simon!” I hugged him around his waist for some reason.

  “What?” Rich gripped my shoulders and yanked me away. “Tell me what’s going on dammit!”

  “The ambulance, he…”

  “What? At the hospital?” Rich jumped, his eyes wide open. He turned towards his room, then bounded out the door past me.

  “They—they—brought him in,” I said, following him.

  Rich stormed down the stairs and out the front door. I followed. He sprinted up the street. The realization that Sy would die sunk into my lungs like two hooks. Wires looped around my arms and legs and bogged me down until I couldn’t run. It felt like something’d broken inside my chest. I sobbed and tried to expel the broken thing—to scream it out. I retched, gagged, and vomited air. Then, I steadied and forced myself to walk toward the hospital. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. I was sure Sy was dead, but then these little sparks of hope started popping inside me, and I thought maybe he’d make it, and I ran again even though the wires tangled me. When I got to the hospital, I gusted past Ryan and Angel at the sills. They looked shocked at having just seen Rich sprint past.

  “What’s going on, Joe?” Angel said solemnly.

  I rushed down the tunnel and sprang through the ER door. Big James snagged me by my collar. “Hold on now, kid, you can’t go in there.”

  I could see Rich down a white corridor talking with a blond doctor. The doctor adjusted his spectacles and said something in a calm, flat tone. A great thing plucked out of Rich in that instant. He crumbled to his knees—clutching his stomach. Silence, then a throttling scream resonated throughout the room. Tears washed down my face as Big James held me there by my arms. The doctor stepped away, and Rich rocked on the floor in the hallway. Beyond him, there was a commotion behind a tall curtain. Doctors and nurses cut in and out of it. Then, the curtain split open. They looked like ants climbing on each other. It yanked shut. Big James spun me and crouched down.

  “Why don’tchu go home and get somebody,” he said somberly.

  When I passed the sills, Angel jogged up beside me.“What’s going on? Did you know that guy or something?” he asked.

  “That was Sy, man,” I answered, staring straight ahead.

  “What?” Angel said, repulsed. “No it wasn’t.”

  “It was Simon,” I said in a cold tone. “He’s dying.”

  Ryan grabbed Angel’s shoulder, and they stopped. I just kept on towards the house. Angel started to say something, but Ryan stopped him. A Medivac helicopter thromped across the sky overhead and disappeared above the leering hospital walls.

  “I thought it might be him,” Ryan said.

  “Oh my God,” Angel replied as I fell out of earshot. I went home and told my parents.

  When I fell to my knees and prayed that night, it was different than when I’d prayed for the Assyrian. I prayed with a bright and unstoppable hope that Sy would survive and make it and live for a very long time. The hope was so powerful that joyful tears streamed down my face as I imagined Sy walking out of the hospital into the golden sunlight weeks later with an eye patch, smiling; his long, dirty-blond hair draped down over his shoulders.

  •

  THEY MEDIVAC’D SY to Weiss Memorial Hospital in Uptown, and he made it through the night, but he was on life support and slipped into a deep coma by the next day. The doctors weren’t giving him much chance at living, but he was holding on. They put him in their coma ward, but it was all for nothing. They pulled the plug a week later.

  After the funeral, Rich went nuts. One day, I was sitting on the porch and Rich and this crazy looking Mexican dude barreled past and inside the house. A few seconds later, they ran out with a bed sheet covering Rich’s 12-gauge shotgun. Rich laughed and put his finger to his lips, shushing me as he passed. I stayed quiet, though at night, my mind raced with all the wonder of the war my brother was fighting as shots rang out in the neighborhood. Rich’d teamed up with the Latin Kings from the set right there on the other side of Clark. They started pulling drive-bys at Hayt Elementary School’s playground where, on any given night, you could find thirty or more PG3s lounging along the high fence near the fieldhouse.

  Rich told me, years later, how he and Shorty and a few other Kings shot them up almost constantly for months. How the Kings taught him to roll up a main drag, an arterial street, and turn onto a one-way. Do your deed—quick, without words—before they could run or get to their heat. Then, you speed off into the maze of side streets—the capillaries of the city. Get out of that neighborhood, preferably into a worse neighborhood like Rogers Park or Little Vietnam, so if the truck was I.D.’d that precinct wasn’t on your shit. They’d have their own crap to deal with. Park the truck near the Red Line, take it to the Bryn Mawr stop. Walk it home. Come back and get the truck the next morning.

  Repeat.

  Repeat until the shit was getting too redundant and crazy for even the Kings. Repeat until a shotgun slug finally finds someone dead-center, or a .25-round skips along the playground asphalt and tears flesh.

  The PG3s began to recognize the big, brown Bronco. One day at Senn, Rich came out of school and every single window had been completely broken out, even the frickin’ rear-view mirrors. They sold the Diesel and bought a blue Dodge Ramcharger, and Rich transferred to a public school out on the Northwest Side.

  But then, worst of all, Spider got off on self-defense ’cause Sy went for the gun. Can you imagine that? He walked after about two months—walked right out of juvie a free man. Rich saw him one night when he was rolling around near this little playground a half-block north of Senn. Spider was just sitting there on a swing with a Walkman in his lap and some headphones on—the big, padded ones with the input you could plug into a stereo outlet. He was just nodding away, maybe waiting for somebody, who knows. Rich didn’t have the .25 on him, or the shotgun, but he had a bat in the truck. Some gnarly, thick-stalked one that Lil Pat’d made in woodshop. Rich drove around the block and parked so he was behind Spider. He got out with the bat and walked up quick, light-footed, trying to be quiet atop the little brown woodchips of the playground. There was no one out. He hid the bat along his thigh as best he could and crept right up behind Spider, who was slowly rocking his head. Rich brought that heavy-stalked bat up over his own head like a two-fisted broadsword and—WAP!—came down directly atop Spider’s narrow craniu
m, cracked his skull, and ended his reign as the PG3s’ shooter.

  Never did figure out if that’s how it really went down. There’re police records, I’m sure, and even people I coulda asked, but maybe part of me didn’t want to find out. Kinda hope that it ain’t how it went down, for Rich’s sake. That’d be a whole lot to carry around for the rest of your life, and he already had plenty to haul.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE OLD MAN

  MA BABYSAT LITTLE JOHNNY FOR FREE to help out. Being a nurse, Mrs. Kerney transferred to Edgewater Hospital so she could spend her lunch break with her grandson. A couple of weeks after her regular lunchtime visits started, shit hit the fan. Ma was in the basement with the older babysitting kids cleaning up, doing laundry, and organizing the mountains of toys—new, old, broken, slobbered-on; hand-made wooden blocks; infant, three-dimensional puzzles mixed with big, plastic machine guns, Tonka trucks, and stuffed animals. You name it, Ma had accumulated it over her 20-odd-years of babysitting. Little Johnny had laid down for a late-morning nap upstairs.

  When Mrs. Kerney arrived, she depressed the glowing, circular doorbell, which didn’t work. Then, she knocked with her brittle, boney hands, which of course Ma couldn’t hear. Down in the basement, there was the racket of the children clapping and clanking toys in toy boxes and muttering bored complaints. The vacuum hummed over it all as Ma occasionally cracked the whip on them.

  Mrs. Kerney walked along the wide porch to the windows that opened into the living room. There, her deep-red, almost orange-headed, 2-year-old grandson slept atop the couch. She rapped her keys excitedly on the thin glass and little Johnny awoke. He sleepily blinked at his gramma’s excited eyes, smiled, and got up scratching the belly of his Tigger shirt. When he got to the window, he spread his pale little arms out wide for her to pick him up. When the glass dividing them wouldn’t allow her, sleepy little Johnny erupted into a hysterical cry. She began to fidget angrily with the window, which sent him running around the room with his arms flailing over his head, screeching. Mrs. Kerney banged on the glass with her fists, a deep bass thunder that resonated in the room. Then, she screamed, “Open the damned door!!!”