High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  He decided to deal crack. The guys around him who had the cars and the game systems, who were eating like kings, that’s what they did. J. R. asked around, but no one at Cabrini would put him on count, giving him the product to sell. Even from Alabama, Willie Sr. still had clout at Cabrini, and he’d asked the local heads to keep his son out of it. G-Ball, J. R.’s cousin from the Castle Crew, told him, “This is what I do, so you don’t have to do it.”

  J. R. was anything if not persistent. He convinced one of his Skee Love guys to give him some work, so long as they split the profits and word never got back to anyone at Cabrini. The friend had gotten a secret stash from a liquor store owner on Larrabee who said he’d gotten the drugs from a cop who worked on the West Side. J. R. headed way up north, far from Cabrini, walking a block that looked to him like a good place to sell the drugs without anyone from home finding out. He’d worked less than a day when the police nabbed him. They’d been staking out the street, building a case against the Cobra Stones there, and then this dumb, loudmouthed kid showed up. If they hadn’t arrested him, they told J. R., he’d likely have been killed that night. The cops didn’t include J. R. in their larger criminal indictment against the Cobra Stones, and as a first-time offender he avoided jail.

  That was the end to his brief career as a crack dealer. In little time, J. R. devised a new moneymaking scheme. It was the spring of 1991, and people in Chicago were fiending as well for Michael Jordan and the Bulls. The team had just swept the Pistons in the playoffs, after losing to Detroit each of the past three years, and the Bulls were on their way to their first-ever title. Jordan, too, was ascendant, appearing in ads for McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Gatorade, Wheaties, Ball Park Franks, Edge shaving cream, Hanes underwear, Nike, and Chevrolet. The basketball movie Heaven Is a Playground, filmed on location at Cabrini-Green, was about to hit theaters, and Jordan had initially signed on to play the lead, pulling out after he’d become too famous. When the Bulls beat the Lakers for the championship that June, many of the stores along Larrabee were looted, people in their revelry and despair firing off guns, smashing windows, and taking whatever goods they could carry. Several of the local shop owners were Jordanian—from the Middle East country of Jordan, that is—and by then fixtures in the neighborhood. But when one of them tried to protect his business, brandishing a gun in front of his store, someone in the melee took the weapon and beat him with it.

  What J. R. did was use his unemployment money from the UPS job, plus a little weed money, and buy a stack of bootleg Bulls championship T-shirts from a vendor on Roosevelt Road. Back home and around the Gold Coast, he resold the shirts for twice what he paid, increasing his stock with each re-up. A man unpossessed of an inside voice, incapable of speaking softly, J. R. was a natural salesman: “Three for twenty-five! Got to sell today!” He’d bully, boast, sweet wheedle. He didn’t take no for an answer, wouldn’t let customers turn around. He’d do anything, he said, to get the dollar from their pocket. Like any great salesman, what J. R. really peddled at all times was himself. And in that product he believed spectacularly.

  J. R. resembled the Bulls’ backup forward Cliff Levingston, with the same deep-set beaded eyes and wide-mouthed smile, the same broad-shouldered build and leonine head topped with a hi-top fade. At clubs around the North Side, J. R. pretended that he was Levingston’s son, and he’d get in without a cover charge or score free drinks. When the Bulls were in the playoffs the following season and still weeks away from their second title, J. R. went all in on the “Repeat” merchandise—the hats and shirts with the paired rings or trophies. To increase his profits, he paid off the deliveryman who brought the goods to the vendor on Roosevelt Road, giving him $700 for the name and address of the New York distributor. From there, he connected directly with the wholesaler in Malaysia. He found another supplier who sold the hologram stickers that signified an NBA-licensed product, affixing them to the knockoff gear. He hired guys from his Skee Love crew, each of them pushing a shopping cart that had been converted into a rolling sporting goods store, with wood beams set up on three sides to display the wares. They sold the Bulls merchandise by the Rock N Roll McDonald’s, on Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, and outside the Near North Side’s actual sporting goods superstore. J. R. had recently joined the Young Democrats of Cook County, showing up afternoons to clean out the ward offices or haul mats for the Jesse White Tumblers. When police officers told him to move along from wherever he’d set up shop, he’d recite the peddling laws he’d memorized. When that didn’t work, he let the police know that they could contact Jesse White, Alderman Natarus, or even the mighty boss of the ward himself, George Dunne.

  ANNIE RICKS

  SETTLED INTO HER fifth-floor apartment in 660 W. Division with her kids and her mother, Annie Ricks refused at first to send her children to the schools in her new neighborhood. Every morning, she put them on a bus and train back to the West Side, an hour-long journey each way. “I knew the area,” she would say of the West Side, so it seemed safer, more manageable. “I didn’t know anything about Cabrini.” But at Schiller, the principal welcomed Annie, assuring her that the Ricks children were going to love it there. He was right. They did love it. Ricks was soon volunteering in their classrooms. From the time she was a little girl in Alabama, she’d wanted to be a teacher. One of her cousins, already in Chicago, had a job in a public school, and that’s what Ricks hoped to do, too. And when she was hired as a teacher’s aide at one of the Cabrini-Green neighborhood schools, it was a dream come true, of sorts.

  That was just one of her jobs. Annie also managed an after-school program through a local church. At three o’clock, she’d leave the elementary school, pick up art supplies and softballs, and lead two dozen children from her building to the blacktop. She’d shepherd the kids on long walks, as far as the beaches and Navy Pier, warning them that if they acted up she would never take them anywhere again. She babysat neighbors’ children and worked at another local organization as well, running sports programs and helping Al Carter with his Cabrini-Green Olympics. Over the summers, she served free lunches out of the park by her high-rise.

  Ricks took her own children across Cabrini-Green for further tutoring at the old Montgomery Ward headquarters. They went to after-school programs in the neighborhood churches and youth centers. And Ricks rarely missed one of their games. The Ricks were a basketball family, the girls as well as the boys starring on their teams. With thirteen of them, Ricks children filled out entire squads in pickup games at Seward Park. Her older children met Scottie Pippen when the Bulls star paid to renovate the basketball courts at Durso Park. Ricks gave birth to Rose during the Bulls’ third NBA finals series, in 1993, and to Raymond during one of the subsequent repeats.

  Annie’s days at Cabrini-Green were long. At home, Ricks might fool around and wrestle with her children. She loved the professional wrestlers Dick the Bruiser and Baron von Raschke, and Ricks and her children would put one another in headlocks and deliver flying elbow smashes. Then many nights she’d head out for a marathon walk. She’d leave the house, maybe not to return for hours, venturing off to Kmart or grocery stores miles away. She’d wander by the lake. Or she’d retrace her path the first time she came to Cabrini-Green, hiking the trail back to the West Side, visiting with one family member or another still living there. “Mama, you need to stay in the house some time,” Kenosha or Latasha or Earnestine might say to her.

  “Who are you talking to? You’re not my mama,” Ricks would answer in mock anger.

  Other nights, Ricks would stay home and barbecue on the ramp, neighbors’ children asking if they could have a plate. Of course, she would tell them, just as soon as she fed her own kids. “We all got along like one big family,” Ricks liked to say.

  The refrain, repeated often by Cabrini-Green residents, was hard to comprehend for outsiders. But neighbors who were like family also hurt one another. Shootings sometimes started while Annie had her after-school classes on the blacktop, and she’d make the child
ren lie flat, herding them in twos and threes back inside the building. Ricks helped her sister get an apartment on the same floor as her, and one day she was visiting when they heard gunshots. Two boys had fired into Annie’s apartment window from the open-air walkway. Her son Raqkown was a toddler at the time, and he was playing by the elevators with Kenosha and another girl when it happened. Kenosha huddled the little ones into a corner so they didn’t get hurt. But Annie’s nephew, who was in his twenties, was inside the apartment, and she found him splayed on the ground, his body outlined in blood and glass. Two shots from two different guns had entered his stomach. The paramedics wouldn’t come at first—they didn’t think it safe. When her nephew was finally taken to the hospital, he died twice. Both times his heart stopped and he was jolted back to life. “God wouldn’t let him die,” Ricks would say.

  She knew the shooters, along with their brothers and aunts and cousins, and had heard they were jealous of her nephew because he had a job and a new Chevy. One of the gunmen was later shot himself, in an unrelated incident, and he was paralyzed from the waist down. Ricks would see his family carting him around in a wheelchair.

  “I didn’t care about the shooting after a while, because I got used to the shooting,” Ricks would say. “I fear no man, no woman. I fear only God.”

  FEAR IS WHAT brought Bernard Rose to Cabrini-Green. A Londoner, he wrote and directed the 1992 horror movie Candyman, adapting the script from a Clive Barker short story that takes place at a Liverpool public housing estate. When Rose arrived in Chicago, unsure where in the city to set his movie, the guys at the municipal film office told him they knew the place. But they said it was impossible to go there without a police escort. Security detail in tow, Rose roamed one of the Cabrini high-rises; he saw murky stairwells, the caves of apartments blackened by fires, entire floors sealed off and abandoned. “There was something obviously spooky about that,” he recalled. He understood that dangerous things happened there, but he also spent time with people like the Rickses, families who were eating dinner, doing homework, and watching television. It felt, too, like everyday life. “The fear around Cabrini was irrational,” Rose concluded. It colored every thought people had about the place, blotting out all else. Which for Candyman, at least, was perfect. Horror is all about the uncertainty between what’s actual and imagined when the danger can’t be seen. In the instant before the anticipated attack, in the shadows of the unknown, terror requires that stories of menace flood the blank spaces of the mind. “The old dark house on the hill has always been the standard setting of horror,” Rose explained. “But it seemed to me that the big public housing project was the new venue of terror.”

  Helen, the protagonist of Rose’s movie, is a white graduate student in Chicago researching urban legends; she is looking into the myth of the Candyman, a hook-handed apparition who appears when his name is uttered five times. A black cleaning woman at the university, overhearing one of Helen’s interviews, says she’s from the South Side, not the Near North Side, but she has a friend who has a cousin who’s from Cabrini-Green, and she says everyone there is scared of the Candyman once it gets dark. This supernatural murderer is rumored to keep a lair inside a block of vacant high-rise apartments. In a film about the hazy boundaries between myth and reality, the fourth-hand information is appropriately vague. It’s enough, though, to send Helen to newspaper archives—where she finds reports of other violent crimes at Cabrini-Green attributed to the phantasm—and then into one of the towers.

  Helen comes to understand, at least in the movie’s mortal sense, that the residents tell tales of the monster as a means to comprehend the incomprehensible brutality of their existence. What else could possibly account for the squalor and isolation and violence in which they live? A societal plot to kill off black people? Utter indifference? Self-inflicted suffering? Why not the Candyman? In this way, the Candyman bears little resemblance to the witch who was said to haunt the barrens along the Ogden Avenue Bridge during Kelvin Cannon’s youth. That bit of folklore was evoked to keep children safely inside their homes at the housing development. Candyman was the physical expression of public housing itself as the threat.

  But Candyman is more about what Cabrini-Green means to those who don’t live there. “Just as urban legends are based on the real fears of those who believe in them, so are certain urban locations able to embody fear,” the critic Roger Ebert wrote of Cabrini-Green in his three-out-of-four-star review of Candyman, in the fall of 1992. The movie’s opening images are of Chicago in the colorless gray of early winter as shot from the sky, the contrapuntal piano and organ of Phillip Glass’s score adding to the ominous effect. The vision of the city is not of a postindustrial dystopia, with burning cars or darkish hordes. This isn’t Escape from New York or Colors. Instead we look down on the repeating tines of skyscrapers, lifeless in their geometric uniformity and drabness. The sprawling towers of Cabrini-Green on which the shot ends don’t seem like distant outliers; they’re nearly indistinguishable from the buildings around them. And that’s the point: wherever you are in the inner city, the danger of Cabrini-Green is always in striking distance. The movie references a real-life crime that occurred at Cabrini-Green in which a man was able to enter a neighboring apartment through connected bathroom vanities so cheaply constructed that he simply pushed in the mirrors to create a passageway. Helen goes into the bathroom in her own high-rise condominium and discovers that she, too, can peel off her mirror to enter the apartment behind hers. She learns that her building was originally part of Cabrini-Green. The projects are coming from inside the house.

  Starting in 1990, Chicago’s population began to inch up, the first increase in forty years. The Near North Side saw an influx of four thousand white residents, and the area’s median income jumped from a quarter of the city average to twice it during the 1980s. The number of building permits more than quadrupled. Vacant lots that had sold for $30,000 a decade earlier were being snapped up for five times that amount. For the young white professionals who chose to live in the city center, the threat of the ghetto was no longer a story of a far-off place—they now inhabited “transitioning” neighborhoods. Movies such as Martin Scorsese’s 1985 comedy After Hours tapped into a phobia held by this new Yuppie class—a white office worker finds himself marooned in a yet-to-be-gentrified section of downtown Manhattan. “NONE OF US IS SAFE,” one of the endless tabloid headlines blared during the hysteria around the Central Park Jogger case. When Jane Byrne moved into Cabrini-Green, six blocks from her Gold Coast home, she called the housing project “a cancer that can spread to every neighborhood in the city.”

  In the spring of 1992, the idea that the violence and disorder of the slums could infect a whole city was being demonstrated elsewhere. As Candyman was being worked on at a Hollywood studio, rioting erupted in Los Angeles following the not-guilty verdicts of four police officers caught on video beating the black motorist Rodney King. A sound engineer doing a rough mix of the movie switched between the filmed scenes of Cabrini-Green and the televised images of young men running in the streets in South Central. “I’m sorry, I can’t do it anymore,” he told Rose, as he packed up his bags and fled for home.

  In adapting the Candyman script, Rose created an elaborate backstory for his killer that tapped into numerous racial tropes. As a corporeal being, Candyman was a gifted portrait artist, the son of a slave at the turn of the nineteenth century whose father earned a fortune after the Civil War by inventing a means to mass-produce shoes. Candyman fell in love with and impregnated one of his subjects, a white woman, and the girl’s father hired thugs to lynch him, chasing him to Cabrini-Green (which did not exist), sawing off his painting hand before setting him on fire. In his reincarnated form, Candyman appears in the film gaunt-cheeked and dark-skinned, towering in a fur-lined trench coat, possibly as hell-bent on miscegenation—Helen is a dead ringer for his postbellum beloved—as on murder.

  In one of the movie’s most frightening scenes, Helen investigates a Cabrini-Gree
n site where legend has it Candyman disemboweled a victim. The setting is the ultimate urban nightmare—a men’s public toilet at a giant inner-city housing project. The toilet’s tiny, freestanding building sits alone on the concrete plaza between the red high-rises, like a decaying shrub overshadowed by giant conifers. It is as much on display for thousands of unseen apartment dwellers as it is abandoned. By herself, of course, Helen enters the public bathroom. Spray-painted threats and indecipherable hieroglyphs cover every surface. She snaps away with a camera for her research. In search of answers, she peers into one stall and gags on the smell. She enters another—the toilets are cracked, overrun, coated in grime. At the last stall she sees graffiti that seems to be a clue. She looks closer, lifting the toilet seat, and recoils. She turns, and a young black man is standing there, filling the small space, blocking her exit. He wears a leather trench coat and holds in his hand a metal hook. Three other guys join him, and one of them grabs Helen from behind. “I hear you’re looking for Candyman, bitch,” the first one says flatly. “Well you found him.” Then he takes the blunt end of the hook and knocks Helen unconscious.

  The movie at this moment captures some of the true horror in the casualness and banality of the violence at Cabrini-Green. This isn’t monster stuff. A guy from the buildings has been appropriating the Candyman myth to prop up his own reputation. Like the shooting into Annie Ricks’s apartment that almost killed her nephew twice, it’s another routine act amid the city’s grinding poverty. The scene ends with the four young men sauntering off, the long camera shot taking in their relaxed stride, the surrounding Cabrini towers, and the downtown Chicago skyline in the near distance.