The Maxwell Street Blues

by Michael Raleigh

  Sunday morning broke hot and sunny. Whelan took a quick shower and then went out for a quick cup of coffee. There was nothing like a Sunday-morning stroll through Uptown to make one appreciate how hard people lived here and what could happen on a warm Saturday night. There was broken taillight glass in the street at several intersections, a demolished car parked halfway up the sidewalk at Wilson and Magnolia, blood on the sidewalk in front of the Wooden Nickel.

  Uptown was conscious but groggy. The wounded were gathering on Wilson Avenue in front of the taverns, outside the hot-dog stand that boasted MAXWELL STREET STYLE POLISH SAUSAGE, in front of the Day Labor Office, and in the doorway of the Wilson Club Hotel, which had taken “Men’s” out of its name in deference to the liberated spirit of the times.

  A short gray-haired man stood in the shadow beneath the El tracks with his hands in his pockets. Whelan had questioned the man in a case a couple of years back. The man nodded and Whelan stopped for a moment, gave him a cigarette, made small talk, and then went on. He got a Sun-Times from the happy little Pakistani who ran the green newsstand on the corner of Wilson and Broadway and then had a quick cup of coffee in the Subway Donut Shop.

  A half hour later he was in his wheezing brown Oldsmobile cruising south on Halsted. There were a dozen more convenient ways to get to Maxwell Street, but this was the route that let you know you were driving through Chicago. This way you went past the hard dun-colored beehives that made up the Cabrini-Green projects, you went across the North Branch of the Chicago River, past the tracks at Hubbard Street where kids in a summer program had covered the viaduct walls with almost a mile of incredible murals. It took you past railroad yards and the place where Greyhound buses slept, past the produce warehouses at Haymarket Square where trucks unloaded crates of strawberries and melons, through a sleeping Greektown where the smells of Saturday night’s meals still hung over the street, and past the University of Illinois—Chicago campus, a maze of nearly identical buildings apparently designed to confuse the unwary freshman.

  Then Halsted crossed Roosevelt Road and the world of order was replaced by the crowded, noisy, smelly welter of shops and street peddlers and strolling salesmen collectively known as Maxwell Street. The glitter of the Loop and Michigan Avenue was just a mile to the east, but on a hot dusty day on Maxwell Street you might as well be in Calcutta.

  He could smell the onions before he was fifty feet past the intersection, and after an initial moment of nausea he decided he was hungry.

  Nine o’clock in the morning and I have a craving for a Polish.

  Midway through the first block the traffic stopped cold, and he found himself sitting in front of a crowded-looking shop that sold stereo equipment. A stern young Korean stood in the window with his arms folded across his chest.

  “Check it out, man.”

  A “salesman” had materialized at Whelan’s window. He held out a thick gold chain. He appeared to have four or five more on a piece of cardboard.

  “No, thanks,” Whelan said.

  “Come on, man.” He held the chain up against Whelan’s shoulder. “Yeah, look good on you.”

  “No, it would look good on Elvis. On Wayne Newton. James Brown, maybe. Not me.”

  The young man gave Whelan a sly grin and said, “How ’bout a watch?”

  Whelan smiled and waved him away. The man moved to the car behind Whelan’s and his place was immediately taken by a black teenager with a plastic bag.

  “Everything in this bag, ten dollars.”

  “What’s in it?”

  This caught the young man off guard. He put his face into the bag for several seconds, looked up at Whelan, and said, “Tube socks.”

  “Ten bucks for a bag of tube socks, huh? You might want to rethink your price structure.” The kid gave him a half smile, and then the traffic began to move and he never got to hear the next sales pitch.

  In the street, on the sidewalks, in the doorways, and from the backs of trucks, people were selling things. Things in bags, things held in the seller’s hand, things in boxes. At the corner of Halsted and Maxwell, people lined the windows of a little wooden shack that sold hot wings, rib tips, and hot sausage links.

  “I’m coming,” Whelan said.

  Directly across the street in Jim’s, half a dozen men in white paper hats scraped grilled onions into piles and handed out hot dogs and reddish-brown Polish sausage. Everywhere else in Chicago people were having scrambled eggs and hash browns. Here on Maxwell Street it was the middle of the day. Some of these people, he knew, had been on the street since five; others hadn’t quite finished with Saturday night yet.

  He had to brake as a couple of young white guys in Bears jackets staggered in front of his car. They gnawed at hot dogs as they walked, shoving massive bites into their mouths. One of them gave Whelan a loopy smile and fell against the front of the car.

  Young drunks on Sunday morning, he thought. My favorite.

  Another half block and he was past the shops and into the real Maxwell Street. The entire area took its name from the great open-air flea market that had once lined both sides of Maxwell Street for blocks, packed with immigrants trying to turn that first buck in the new country. Maxwell itself was little more than an alley now, a narrow dusty street of vacant lots and crumbling sidewalks. But along these curbs and back lots for the length of Maxwell and Liberty, and up and down both sides of Peoria and Thirteenth Street, and all the way to the viaducts and railroad tracks to the south, people were selling things.

  The landscape was marked by huge mounds of discarded tires, by abandoned buses that now served as temporary quarters for the sellers, and by shacks and lean-tos. There were sleepy-looking sellers and vendors who made eye contact from half a block away, and bored kids working long hours for an uncle or a cousin. This was where stray dogs came to live out their fantasies, where old car parts got a second chance at life, and where your hubcaps came when someone lifted them.

  He drove up and down the narrow streets once and then parked in a muddy lot just behind the old Maxwell Street precinct house.

  When he stepped out of the Jet he put his foot in a hole filled with gray water.

  I hope this isn’t an omen, he thought.

  He looked down at his feet: he now had one gray running shoe and one white one. People would try to sell him shoes here.

  He began by making his way over to Fourteenth Street, where the Mexicans came on weekends to buy and sell produce and odds and ends. There were hundreds of sellers and, on a warm day like this one, thousands of buyers. He walked through the crowd at a leisurely pace and took in the noises, the babble of Spanish and English, the smells of citrus fruits, onions, tomatoes, fresh or dried peppers—every variety of peppers that grew on God’s hot spicy planet—plus chorizo, hot sauce, eggs, and tapes of mariachi bands and operatic tenors. A person could buy mangoes here, and guavas, and avocados, and even cactus, needles and all.

  And there were cooking smells here as well, as though all of creation had come down to Maxwell Street looking for Paul Whelan. There was a little man stirring strips of beef and onions on a portable grill and slapping the mixture onto tortillas, a stand where a dollar got you three homemade tamales awash in an angry red salsa, a little fat man selling tortas and ice cold cans of mango and guava juice from the back of his vending truck. You could buy long sugary churros for dessert and coffee or Mexican hot chocolate to wash them down.

  People were hawking other things as well, hammers and cheap toys, T-shirts and aluminum foil, but there were no black people selling here. He left the world of cheap oranges and homemade tortillas and walked east a block, to Peoria.

  The sellers here came in all colors; there were Arabs and Asiatics, whites and homegrown blacks, and they all wanted to sell him something.

  A Korean tried to talk him into new shoes: “These shoes, just like Nikes. Twenty dollars.”

  “Three-vay light bulbs. Vun dollah.” A heavyset white man with a Slavic accent held up one fat finger. He point
ed to a package of double-A batteries. “Vun dollah.” He pointed to a large bottle of laundry detergent. “Vun dollah.”

  Whelan pointed to a tiny portable television. “One dollar?”

  The man laughed. “You crazy? Hundred dollah.”

  A few feet away, a Greek-looking man and woman sat on folding chairs behind a card table on which they had displayed two dozen ax handles. They stared impassively at passersby. The ax handles were brand new but paled in comparison to the prize item of this little patch of Maxwell Street: a pair of matching toilets, untouched, pristine, canary yellow. If you were looking for a good buy on a matched set of bright yellow commodes, this was your spot.

  Whelan stopped for a moment and looked at them. He felt it was the least he could do.

  At the corner of Thirteenth Place and Peoria a battle was in progress. A chubby white man in vile-looking coveralls had attracted a small crowd for his performance, a loud, profane, sweating struggle with a hubcap that refused to fit onto a customer’s car. The man’s head seemed to wobble slightly as he worked at the hubcap, and Whelan guessed that in addition to all his other offenses against society he was drunk.

  Judging by the tiny flag hanging from his rearview mirror, the customer was Mexican. His car was a rolling wonder of chrome and decals and decorations, and he was short one hubcap. The grimy white man had hubcaps to sell him, thousands and thousands of hubcaps, all visible to the passerby in shining steel piles behind a plywood shack. Particularly noteworthy hubcaps had been displayed on the walls of the shack, like choice heads in a hunting lodge.

  The Mexican watched the efforts of the white man and shook his head with a worried look. This was bad business. He looked at his car and shook his head again.

  “It’s not gonna fit.”

  The dirty man looked up from the hubcap. “It’ll fit. I’ll make it fit.” He whacked the hubcap with a beefy fist, slammed it sidelong with his forearm, stood, and kicked it.

  “Come on, you sonofabitch!” He kicked it again, filling the morning air with sounds a blacksmith might make. His face grew red beneath its layer of grease and dirt, and finally he let it all go and began cursing the hubcap as he kicked away at it, pausing only to change feet. He called the hubcap all the things he’d ever called people and more, inventing new combinations and unlikely marriages of noun and verb till he had the onlookers laughing and himself on the brink of exhaustion. He backed off a step, wound up, and fetched the offending hubcap a great dropkick dead center. The car rocked, the hubcap made grinding noises and flew off into the air, and the man in the coveralls landed on his back in the dirt.

  The Mexican leapt at this opportunity to save his beloved car and slid in behind the steering column before the white man was even halfway on his feet.

  He laid rubber going east, and the chubby white man just watched. He got himself righted again, made a pantomime of brushing himself off, and muttered something to himself. Then he picked up the reluctant hubcap. He squinted at it, spat on an apparent imperfection, rubbed it with his filthy sleeve, and said, “Shit. I coulda got this fucker on.”

  Then he bent his grimy form and came up throwing, flinging the hubcap into the air like a cut-rate discus. The hubcap gained altitude, amazing the onlookers with its stability and grace in flight. Whelan could make out each tight rotation as it flew over Maxwell Street in search of less troubled climes, a high-tech Frisbee seeking happiness. The hubcap’s owner seemed awed by what he’d accomplished. He stood with his hands on his hips and stared openmouthed at the missile he’d given life to.

  “No shit,” he said.

  Then, as they all watched silently, the hubcap came down, hard and fast like a Cub pitcher’s hanging curve landing in the bleachers. It came to earth somewhere in the vicinity of Halsted and O’Brien with a sound unique to city life, the inimitable street music of a windshield giving up the ghost.

  “Whoops!” somebody said.

  The grimy man walked away. “Not my fault,” he mumbled.

  I love this place, Whelan thought.

  The audience broke up and Whelan walked on, only to be stopped a few feet away by a dog. It was not much of a dog, a skeleton wearing a rug. He was a skinny, runty thing with one bent ear and holes in his coat, and at the moment he had what remained of his dentures sunk into a teddy bear that he gnawed and shook and growled at. He swung the bear up into the air and then slammed it down on the pavement, and his growl changed pitch when he saw Whelan. He looked up at Whelan with his little dark eyes and made unfriendly noises.

  “Easy there, tiger. Easy.”

  “Dog ain’t interested in you. He just want to beat on that bear.”

  Whelan took his eyes off the dog for a moment. The speaker was a black man in his sixties. He was sitting a few feet away behind a makeshift table, a plywood sheet laid across two sawhorses. He had a silver beard and amused eyes and wore a dark raincoat and a little leather cap tipped jauntily over one eye.

  “Your dog?”

  “No, sir. My bear.”

  The dog lit into the teddy bear one more time, and stuffing appeared from one corner of the head.

  “I don’t think you’re gonna sell that one.”

  A smile was working its way out into the light. The man shook his head. “That one ain’t for sale. I bring it for the dog. Sonofabitch gimme some peace then.” The man chuckled. “He’s always here, waitin’ on me.”

  “He likes you.”

  “Oughta like me.” The man looked at his wares, then up at Whelan. “See anything you need, sir? It’s all good, no junk here. Give you a nice deal.”

  At his little curbside store the man had displayed an impressive collection of flathead and Phillips screws, carriage bolts, nuts, screwdrivers and pliers, boxes of nails in three sizes, tacks, and staples. There were rolls of packing tape and a big silver block of duct tape. He also had boxes of trash bags, bags of salted peanuts, fresh eggs, a boxed set of crescent wrenches, and a neat little wooden box of drill bits.

  The most interesting piece in this shop, however, sat behind the black man: a section of chain-link fence with the gate still attached. It had been painted forest green but the rain and salt and snow had eaten holes in the color, and the gate part still wore a sign that said BEWARE OF DOG.

  “Nice.” Whelan nodded at the gate.

  “Gonna buy it? Naw, didn’t think so.”

  Whelan felt the man watching him, and when his glance lit on the drill bits the man spoke.

  “That’s a nice set. German.”

  Whelan picked it up: $10 was written in faint pencil on the side of the box.

  “I can do better,” the seller said.

  “How much better?”

  “Nine dollars.”

  “Eight,” Whelan said.

  “Eight-fifty.”

  “Deal.” Whelan smiled.

  The old man smiled. “Give you that gate for eight-fifty, too.”

  “No, thanks. Don’t need any gates.”

  “Sell you that dog for five bucks,” the old man said, and laughed.

  “You here every week?” Whelan counted out eight singles and some change.

  The man nodded, took the money without looking at it. “Every week. Rain or shine, every week. Christmas come on a Sunday, I’ll be here. Every year for thirty years.”

  “You know all the folks around here?”

  The man shook his head. “Know ’em to see ’em, but we don’t all speak. We don’t all talk English, for one. They all right, though.”

  “It’s a good place.”

  “Yes, sir, it is. Sometimes folk come down, expectin’ something different. They don’t like what they find here, but it’s a good place. Interesting. Nothing like it was, though.”

  “I remember, a little bit. I used to come down here with my mother and my grandmother on Sundays. My father thought a lot of it was junk.” Whelan smiled.

  “Well, a lot of it was. Still is. But you got to go through junk to find something special. And that’s half th
e fun.” He squinted up at Whelan. “You know what Waterford is, my man?”

  “Irish crystal. It’s beautiful, and it costs a lot.”

  “That’s right. I found a Waterford crystal pitcher in an alley on the South Side. In a box of junk. Old lady, maybe it was an old man, I don’t know, but somebody old passed and folk come along and dumped out all their possessions. It was a nasty-looking old house on a real poor street and the people didn’t have much. Old things, and they were in bad shape. And in this one box with a whole lot of busted-up plates and glasses, I found this pitcher. I knew what it was, too. Took it home and cleaned it up, and then I took it down to an antiques man on Archer. He offered me a hundred dollars for it, so I knew what I had. He offers me a hundred, it’s gotta be worth three, four.”

  “You sell it?”

  The old man chuckled and gave him a wry look. “I ever get to where I don’t know where I’m gonna get my next meal, then maybe I’ll sell it. And maybe not.” The old man grinned at him and took out a cigarette from a flattened pack in his shirt pocket.

  Whelan lit the smoke for him. “My name’s Paul. What’s yours?”

  “Jesse.”

  “Do you know Sam Burwell, Jesse?”

  The man nodded, looking down the street. “I know Sam.”

  “Seen him lately?”

  “No, sir.” The old man looked down at his hands.

  “Where does he set up?”

  Jesse thought for a moment, studying Whelan. Eventually he decided there was no harm in this information. “Up there on Liberty. He like to be up there near all the food places. Sam don’t have much to sell, so he needs to be where there’s more, you know, traffic. Up by that tire place.”

  He pointed off toward the corner. Whelan could see a corrugated iron wall around what appeared to be a mountain of old tires. In the center was a bus, painted blue, its windows covered with curtains.

  “That one with the blue bus inside?”

  The old man looked at the bus and it seemed to loosen him up. He chuckled. “Yeah. When Sam is here, he set up right around the corner from that place. But I don’t think he been doing himself any good. Think Sam’s got trouble. He’s a sick man. That’s why I haven’t seen ’im.” He seemed to think for a moment. “I don’t think Sam’s been here in a couple weeks. Last time I saw him, it was a Sunday. I had myself a drink after I packed up my goods, and I come by here on my way home, and Sam was gone, but he didn’t even pick up all his stuff. The tarp he uses was still there, and a pack of C-cell batteries. I got ’em right here.” He reached under his makeshift table and brought out the batteries. “Keepin’ ’em for ’im, but I haven’t seen the man.” He shook his head. “A shame. Young man like that. He’s twenty years younger than I am, you know.”