We went to a juice bar Debbie knew around the corner from the music store. I had a Coco-Nana and she had something with mango, papaya, and passion fruit.
“So how’d you think I knew you played sax? By your thumb callus?” She laughed.
We compared the thumb calluses we had from holding our horns. She was funny. I’d never met a girl so easy to talk to. We talked about music and saxophone reeds and school. The only thing wrong was that I kept telling her lies. I told her I played in a band in Cicero in a club that was run by the Mafia. She said she’d never been to Cicero, but it sounded like really the pits. “Really the pits” was one of her favorite phrases. She lived on the North Side and invited me to visit. When she wrote her address down on a napkin and asked if I knew how to get there. I said, “Sure, I know where that is.”
North to Freedom, I kept thinking on my way to her house the first time, trying to remember all the bull I’d told her. It took over an hour and two transfers to get there. I ended up totally lost. I was used to streets that were numbered, streets that told you exactly where you were and what was coming up next. “Like knowing the latitude,” I told her.
She argued that the North Side had more class because the streets had names.
“A number lacks character, David. How can you have a feeling for a street called Twenty-second?” she asked.
She’d never been on the South Side except for a trip to the museum.
I’d ride the Douglas Park B train home from her house and pretend she was sitting next to me, and as my stop approached I’d look down at the tarpaper roofs, back porches, alleys, and backyards crammed between factories and try to imagine how it would look to someone seeing it for the first time.
At night, Twenty-second was a streak of colored lights, electric winks of neon glancing off plate glass and sidewalks as headlights surged by. The air smelled of restaurants — frying burgers, pizza parlors, the cornmeal and hot-oil blast of taquerías. Music collided out of open bars. And when it rained and the lights on the oily street shimmered, Deejo would start whistling “Harlem Nocturne” in the backseat.
I’d inherited a ’53 Chevy from my father. He hadn’t died, but he figured the car had. It was a real Blightmobile, a kind of mustardy, baby-shit yellow where it wasn’t rusting out, but built like a tank, and rumbling like one, too. That car would not lay rubber, not even when I’d floor it in neutral, then throw it into drive.
Some nights there would be drag races on Twenty-fifth Place, a dead-end street lined with abandoned factories and junkers that winos dumped along the curb. It was suggested to me more than once that my Chevy should take its rightful place along the curb with the junkers. The dragsters would line up, their machines gleaming, customized, bull-nosed, raked, and chopped, oversize engines revving through chrome pipes; then someone would wave a shirt and they’d explode off, burning rubber down an aisle of wrecks. We’d hang around watching till the cops showed up, then scrape together some gas money and go riding ourselves, me behind the wheel and Ziggy fiddling with the radio, tuning in on the White Sox while everyone else shouted for music.
The Chevy had one customized feature: a wooden bumper. It was something I was forced to add after I almost ruined my life forever on Canal Street. When I first inherited the car all I had was my driver’s permit, so Ziggy, who already had his license, rode with me to take the driving test. On the way there, wheeling a corner for practice, I jumped the curb on Canal Street and rumbled down the sidewalk until I hit a NO PARKING sign and sent it flying over the bridge. Shattered headlights showered the windshield and Ziggy was choking on a scream caught in his throat. I swung a U and fled back to the neighborhood. It took blocks before Ziggy was able to breathe again. I felt shaky too and started to laugh with relief. Zig stared at me as if I were crazy and had purposely driven down the sidewalk in order to knock off a NO PARKING sign.
“Holy Christ! Dave, you could have ruined your life back there forever,” Zig told me. It sounded like something my father would have said. Worries were making Ziggy more nervous that summer than ever before. The Sox had come from nowhere to lead the league, triggering Zig’s old nightmare about atom bombs falling on the night the White Sox won the pennant.
Besides the busted headlights, the sign pole had left a perfect indentation in my bumper. It was Pepper’s idea to wind chains around the bumper at the point of indentation, attach the chains to the bars of a basement window, and floor the car in reverse to pull out the dent. When we tried it the bumper tore off. So Pepper, who saw himself as mechanically inclined, wired on a massive wooden bumper. He’d developed a weird affection for the Chevy. I’d let him drive and he’d tool down alleys clipping garbage cans with the wooden front end in a kind of steady bass-drum beat: boom boom boom.
Pepper reached the point where he wanted to drive all the time. I understood why. There’s a certain feeling of freedom you can get only with a beater, that comes from being able to wreck it without remorse. In a way it’s like being indestructible, impervious to pain. We’d cruise the neighborhood on Saturdays, and everywhere we looked guys would be waxing their cars or tinkering under the hoods.
I’d honk at them out the window on my sax and yell, “You’re wasting a beautiful day on that hunk of scrap.”
They’d glance up from their swirls of simonize and flip me the finger.
“Poor, foolish assholes,” Pepper would scoff.
He’d drive with one hand on the wheel and the other smacking the roof in time to whatever was blaring on the radio. The Chevy was like a drum-set accessory to him. He’d jump out at lights and start bopping on the hood. Since he was driving, I started toting along my sax. We’d pull up to a bus stop where people stood waiting in a trance and Pepper would beat on a fender while I wailed a chorus of “Hand Jive”; then we’d jump back in the Chevy and grind off, as if making our getaway. Once the cops pulled us over and frisked us down. They examined my sax as if it were a weapon.
“There some law against playing a little music?” Pepper kept demanding.
“That’s right, jack-off,” one of the cops told him, “It’s called disturbing the peace.”
Finally, I sold Pepper the Chevy for twenty-five dollars. He said he wanted to fix it up. Instead, he used it as a battering ram. He drove it at night around construction sites for the new expressway, mowing down the blinking yellow barricades and signs that read: SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE…
Ziggy, who had developed an eye twitch and had started to stutter, refused to ride with him anymore.
The Sox kept winning.
One night, as Pepper gunned the engine at a red light on Thirty-ninth, the entire transmission dropped out into the street. He, Deejo, and I pushed the car for blocks and never saw a cop. There was a slight decline to the street and once we got it moving, the Chevy rolled along on its own momentum. Pepper sat inside steering. With the key in the ignition the radio still played.
“Anybody have any idea where we’re rolling to?” Deejo wanted to know.
“To the end of the line,” Pepper said.
We rattled across a bridge that spanned the drainage canal, and just beyond it Pepper cut the wheel and we turned off onto an oiled, unlighted cinder road that ran past a foundry and continued along the river. The road angled downhill, but it was potholed and rutted and it took all three of us grunting and struggling to keep the car moving.
“It would have been a lot easier to just dump it on Twenty-fifth Place,” Deejo panted.