The Old Neighborhood

by Bill Hillmann

  Little Johnny froze. He looked at his gramma in an appalled horror, then he ran away down the hall and out of sight. Mrs. Kerney returned to the front door and slammed into the wood. The door hopped slightly but remained shut. She turned to the neighborhood and screamed, “Someone call the police!!!”

  No one called the cops. Mrs. Sanchez from across the street did call Ma, and somehow, through all the calamitous children, the vacuum, and the tussling washer and dryer, Ma heard the ringer. She rushed to the basement phone and answered it on the second ring.

  “Linda, there is some crazy lady on you porch screaming for somebody to call the police.”

  “What!?” Ma said, then slammed the phone down and rushed up the basement stairs. She heard little Johnny crying and the frantic pounding at the front door. She rushed over and threw it open, and Mrs. Kerney pushed past Ma with tears beading down her wrinkled cheeks. She rushed down the hall to the kitchen to find her precious little Johnny. He looked up at her barreling toward him, and turned and ran. But she was so fast that she cooped him up before he got away and squeezed him to her bony chest.

  “Oh, my darling, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I let this happen to you!!!” she wailed, then walked back towards the door with him crying and writhing in her arms.

  “What the heck’s going on? Where are you going with him?” Ma said.

  “I won’t put up with this kind of neglect! I’m taking him out of here for good!”

  “Are you sure you should be taking him? Aren’t you going to call Karen and let her know?”

  “I’ll be having a very, very long conversation with my daughter about the care of my dear grandson. You can guarantee that!” She hustled out of the front door with little Johnny still in hysterics and reaching out a hand toward the only one of the three who wasn’t crying.

  We all knew Blake thought he was better than us—better than each of us and better than the family as a whole. He was destined for greater things—a greater, larger world of excellence. We’d felt hints of it in his comments over the years, but it was only a prelude to his final, conclusive statement.

  That night, Blake showed up with Karen in his CPD sweater and turtleneck. He’d gotten bigger now—fatter from the donuts and diner food. He was stoic. His frozen scowl had a sense of duty in it, and his actions had a sense of long-sustained waiting for this day to come.

  “I’m not putting up with this. You people live in a filthy, God-damned pigsty. It’s a fucking zoo for Christ’s sake.” He stood tall as his parents sat at the dinner table with their heads in their hands, all reason spent. “All my life I had to live in it. I won’t force my son to live in it now.”

  “Blake, he was up here alone for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. You’ve never left him alone for fifteen minutes, Karen?” Ma pleaded. Tears welled in her blue eyes. “He’s never woken up fifteen minutes before you?”

  “That’s enough!” Blake shouted. “I’m not putting up with it! You’re neglecting my son!” Blake waved Karen to her feet, and she rose sniffling into a wad of paper towel.

  Blake took a deep breath, clenching his eyes closed. “You won’t see him or me ever again. You’re not my family anymore.” He said it with a hint of exhaustion. His shoulders slumped, and there was a sense of completion in the air.

  He stomped out of the house with Karen sniffling behind him, and that was it for two long years; we didn’t hear a word from them. Until one day, Blake and Karen finally decided to get married, and they needed someone to foot the bill ’cause Mrs. Kerney certainly wasn’t going to. Dad coughed it up as a way to get back in his son’s and grandson’s lives. I guess Blake’d never forgiven Dad for what he was—a hard man.

  •

  HE USED TO SMACK MA every morning when she came to wake him up for work after brewing his pot of coffee. Just spin off the mattress, back-hand her, and see how far he could send her flying across the room. Until she finally woke him with a heavy iron frying pan crack to the side of his head.

  He beat Lil Pat from the time he could walk, and as Lil Pat got older, it got worse. Blake was different, though. He was so sick for so much of his childhood that Ma wouldn’t let Dad near him. Blake was a preteen before Dad started to crack him, but he was so good that he rarely got in trouble, so he almost never got one. When Blake came home from Drake with a D-average the summer of his freshman year, that all changed in a split second.

  Dad got the news a few weeks into summer. It was late, like two in the morning, and Blake was out drinking at some kegger. When he got home, Dad was waiting for him at the kitchen table with the grades splayed out in front of him atop the lumpy imperfections of the handmade oak tabletop.

  Dad said he wasn’t gonna pay for those kinda shit grades, and Blake stomped out of the brightly lit kitchen saying he didn’t want to hear it with a dismissive wave. That’s when he slipped up and said, “What do you know about it? You didn’t even graduate high school….” Blake tossed his head back with a laugh. “Not even close!”

  Dad stomped after him into the dark hallway. Blake heard him and whirled around by the stairs. He was now a good four inches taller than Dad. Blake cocked back his meaty arm, grimaced, and growled through his teeth. Dad froze mid-step and feebly raised his large, bony hands and petered backward. His whole being trembled.

  Blake flashed his All-American, smug grin, raised his chin, and turned back on his path. He sighed to himself, and as the sigh died down, it trickled into a chuckle. Dad sank downward, stepped with him. Then, he swung wide and slammed his heavy fist into the base of Blake’s jaw from behind. Blake froze, pole-axed. He began to turn, and his arms and legs locked up, rigid. He toppled forward. Then, Blake plummeted and flopped, belly-down, on the hardwood floor. He laid there, gulping heavy breaths, flat out with his cheek on the cool wood planks.

  You could say he was a bad father, I guess. Anyone who beats their kids is wrong and all that, but that New Age, just give ’em a “time out” stuff is bullshit. But my Dad took the reins as the father of his younger brothers at the age of twelve. Imagine that. Dad’s dad was gone—crumbled into alcoholism—and with six little brothers to raise, Dad had one way to get their attention. Ever try to tell a gang of wild little boys to stop doing something? To shut up? Cracking a little kid, like it or not, gets their instant, undivided attention. Considering he became a dad at twelve and a biological father at fifteen, I think the old man did pretty good—under the circumstances, that is.

  As far as Blake goes, Dad was slaving on the job site, killing himself every day, and he was still living check to check and almost losing the house anytime something unexpected came up. And all so Blake could go to some expensive school to play football when he didn’t have a chance in hell of doing anything in the sport. Then Blake turns around and throws that in Dad’s face? I woulda stomped him after he went down. But dat’s just me.

  CHAPTER 11

  ASSASSINS

  THERE’S PEOPLE OUT THERE that’ll tell you racism is a basic tribal instinct—something embedded deep in our collective unconscious. A primal urge to be with our own, to protect our village. And that may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s one of the ugliest partitions in the heart of man.

  Over a year had passed since Sy died. Even though Spider was gone, sputtering in some home with severe brain damage, there was still a war raging inside of Rich. The violence in him was getting more and more misguided and random. A gay bar had opened up south of us on Clark. Rich drove over there with his paintball gun one night and waited out front. Two guys in neon-yellow, tight shirts drunkenly exited the bar’s brightly lit front door. Rich plunked a few speeding red balls that burst on their neon shirts, then he peeled off. It only leaves bruises, but the sudden, painful sting had them screaming their lungs out thinking they’d been shot for real. It’s sick, I know. Rich’d graduated from high school and was a first-year apprentice carpenter. They were riding him hard on the sites like th
ey do everybody, but he wasn’t taking it too good. With his revenge extracted from the PG3s, Rich’s general malice simmered into these opportunistic bursts of hatred.

  Ryan, Angel, and I were on our posts at the sills, ever-diligent and ready for what was to come. It was early summer, and school’d just let out. I sat in the center sill to keep those two from fucking killing each other. Ryan posted up at the sill nearest the alley and Ashland, which was all struck bright. The orange-yellow streetlight beams emanated above and along the faded-green poles. Angel sat in the other one nearest the thickly tree-shadowed side street. Ryan couldn’t handle sitting on that side; he’d constantly mistake the sway of a low-hung tree branch for some enemy trying to get the drop on us. And then, he’d leap to his feet and shout, “Who the fuck’s dat!” squinting into the darkness. His temples’d flare until he was worn thin with a headache. Angel didn’t see any invisible foes and probably wouldn’t have minded if he did. He wasn’t scared of much, plus everybody liked Angel anyhow.

  I’d gotten bigger, but I was still the smallest out of the three of us. Ryan was the biggest and oldest by about six-months. He’d hit his growth spurt first and grew out and up in equal proportions. His husky arms and legs sprouted red hair.

  Our individual styles had begun to form. Ryan wore his hair short, almost shaved. It was a “one” on the clippers, and he had a narrow finger of hair that protruded near the base of his skull that dangled over his collar. He rocked a fake-ass gold rope chain. His face was always knotted up in a snarl, and his eyes were forever challenging and assessing strangers until they looked down or away. Though there was a goofiness about him that came out when it was just us three. But he was easily insulted and slow on his toes with comebacks, which sunk him into his broiling temper that’d eject vicious shouts and quivering sneers. Angel was an expert at bringing out this response in Ryan. Sometimes it seemed that if it weren’t for their friendship with me, the two would never hang around each other.

  Angel had sprouted up tall and lanky with high cheekbones and long, jet-black hair. He wore his hair with the sides and back buzzed short, and a long, silky shock sat on top. He tied the end of the long shock in a ponytail that hung above the stubbly hair like the tail-feathers of a Blue Jay. Everything was sleek and slick about his appearance, but his temperament was completely the opposite. It didn’t take much to crack him up and release his whining, wacky chortle. Then, he’d bare his long top-front teeth, all perfectly spaced and aligned and glossy white. He’d draw the humor out of anything said, goad grins from the speaker, and then send them tumbling into some sarcastic folly of meaning and almost always predictably something sexually perverse. He was one of those guys that habitually took it too far and sent the conversation down into the depths of necrophilia, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and fecal fetishes. It got to the point where you didn’t know whether to keep laughing or vomit, but that was Angel.

  I’d taken to wearing my hair slicked back and sprayed stiff with Aqua Net, with the sides buzzed and sharpened into a V at the base of my neck. We’d all picked up on that West Coast style of either blue or tan Dickies work pants with old-school, low-top Nikes, Pumas, or Adidas.

  A couple hood rats lurked around that night—dirty, mangy, and loud—trying to impress us and smoking cigarettes. Hood rats weren’t so good looking. They wore huge, gaudy jewelry, gold necklaces, and big fake-stone rings. They used cheap grandma perfume and way too much makeup—dark eye-liner and fake eyelashes. They were all a little on the chunky side—or thick, as the brothas would call ’em—but this didn’t stop them from wearing skin-tight jeans with high-tops and big t-shirts that made it look like they had giant tits, but really just hid the bloated lump of their bellies. Half of ’em were pregnant by the time they got to high school, and the other half were pregnant by the time they got out.

  Some of the hood rats could fight, and some just thought they could until they got womped on publically. The ability to fight actually mattered to these girls. They were kinda tomboys in a way, but more just girls raised with roughnecks for older brothers, uncles, and fathers. It was the life they knew, you could say. And it wasn’t all that difficult to get a hood rat to suck you off in an alley. They were kinda like peewee hookers in training, and they were always screeching and whining about something. But in the end, I guess they were like any other young girls; they were just out there trying to find themselves, looking for romance—and even love—and doomed like so many of us to never find it.

  I couldn’t stand hood rats. The thought of kissing one, or even letting one slob my thang, made my stomach bubble. Kissing one of them was like smooching the nut-sacks of half the 13-year-olds in the neighborhood. No, thank you. But there was something sad to me then about the way they were, too.

  Vicky leaned against the partition separating me and Ryan’s sills wearing a short tan skirt and a big airbrushed t-shirt with her name written in pink and purple cursive. She was puffing on a Merit 100 she probably stole from her aunt, and her deep red lipstick was smeared on the butt. She had a ton of Aqua Net in her shoulder-length, light-brown perm, which crinkled every time she tossed her head back to expel a short string of smoke.

  Samantha stood across from Vicky and made obviously excited eyes with her like it was some little staged performance Vicky was putting on.

  I sighed at the mountain range of pointy blackheads that spread across Vicky’s chunky cheeks; she’d smothered and caked them over with makeup. Vicky’d been following me around for a week now, and she’d done the same to Angel months back—he just made fun of her until she gave up on him. Ryan’d bounced her chin off his balls a few times before he got bored. I planned on just ignoring her until she went away.

  The lights were out in Sy’s old window across the street. Some flowery, yellow drapes hung in ’em, and they swayed lazily in and out of the open window with the breeze.

  “Man, I miss Sy,” I said.

  “Yeah, he wasn’t so bad,” Angel said as he slid his palm-comb through his oily hair.

  “He was like another big brother, ya know?”

  “Yeah, but all he ever did was beat-cho-ass,” Ryan said laughing.

  “Naw….” I shook my head. “He was just playing. Hell, that’s what I’d do if I had a little brother.”

  “Yeah, he was funny.” Ryan grinned. “Always yelling out that damned window of his, playing that Slayer shit. I don’t know what was worse.”

  “Slayer ain’t so bad,” I said, scrunching my brow at Ryan.

  “Man, I don’t know how you listen to that shit,” Ryan jeered.

  “I like Slayer,” Vicky sang. She leaned up against my sill and batted her darkened, vampire-ish eyes.

  “Dr. Dre—now that’s some good shit,” Ryan said, waving his hand over his head in hip-hop fashion.

  “Man, if Mickey knew you were listening to that shit…” I raised my eyebrows.

  “Man, Mickey… He’s too old-school. This the new generation,” Ryan admonished. “Hell, he’s the baddest gangsta in the whole neighborhood; Dre’s talking about him in dem songs.”

  “Man, Mickey hates Dr. Dre as much as he hates them Ds up in Rogers Park,” I snapped.

  “It’s different, man,” Ryan urged.

  “You know dem niggers by your house are gonna flip Stones soon anyway,” Angel added, glancing down Hollywood.

  “Man, what the fuck are you saying?” Ryan replied in disgust. “We’re staying Crew forever… KC,” he bellowed.

  “Once they go to Senn, man, that shit’ll all be over,” I said, cocking my head to the side and locking eyes with Ryan.

  “Man, just look at T-Money and Twon,” Angel reasoned. “They were Krazy Crew. Now look at ’em; they’re Stones. Hell, they started the whole thing.”

  “Hey look, the TJOs is Peoples, too, so it don’t matter,” Ryan said, grimacing. His face and scalp reddened.

  “It matters, man...” I sighed. “It matters.”
>
  “Man, it’ll be different. You’ll see. We’re gonna be Crew forever.” Ryan rocked back, swelled his chest out, and threw up the KC with both his hands. “In fact, quit with that ’nigger’ shit. Monteff is coming through... He’s got some a dat flame ’dro!”

  Monteff had gotten a hold of some Hydroponic-grown marijuana and was coming through to share. I think he liked to get away from the Dead-End-Docks—the constant family bickering, the cops always hounding the alley, the redundant gangbanging. Over here at the sills, it was quiet, except when Ryan and Angel were snarling at each other. Plus, we could get away with smoking a bowl right there, too—just crawl in one of the sills and toke. Monteff had a way of keeping the focus of conversation off negative crap, and that helped me a lot in keeping Ryan and Angel from colliding. Sometimes, if we got high enough, we'd even talk about deep shit—black holes, the meaning of life, fate. It was cool ’cause Monteff would defend anyone’s wild ideas, no matter how stupid or crazy they were. I liked having him around. We all did.

  “Mickey just needs to smoke a J and chill his ass out,” Ryan vented.

  “Mickey is scary,” Vicky sang in a girly-girl voice as she whipped the length of her crinkly perm over her shoulder.

  “Shit, Mickey ain’t scary,” Ryan sneered. “I ain’t scared a him.”

  “He sure is a killer, though,” I said, smiling at Vicky.

  “That he is,” Ryan replied as he looked down toward Ashland and Clark.

  I stood and leaned against the same partition as Vicky, and she batted her eyes at me. “We were there when they killed that motherfucker,” I said.

  Ryan laughed and flicked his cigarette.

  “Smashed his fucking brains out with his own pistol!” I added.

  Angel and Ryan broke up on that one.