One afternoon I caught my younger brother in the basement, stuffing my bottle caps into his pocket.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.
At first he wouldn’t talk, but. I had him by the T-shirt, which I worked up around his throat, slowly twisting it to a knot at his windpipe.
He led me into the backyard, to a sunless patch behind the oil shed, and pointed. Everywhere I looked I could see my bottle caps half buried, their jagged edges sticking up among clothespin crosses and pieces of colored glass.
“I’ve been using them as tombstones,” he said, “in my insect graveyard.”
Blight
During those years between Korea and Vietnam, when rock and roll was being perfected, our neighborhood was proclaimed an Official Blight Area.
Richard J. Daley was mayor then. It seemed as if he had always been, and would always be, the mayor. Ziggy Zilinsky claimed to have seen the mayor himself riding down Twenty-third Place in a black limousine flying one of those little purple pennants from funerals, except his said WHITE SOX on it. The mayor sat in the backseat sorrowfully shaking his head as if to say “Jeez!” as he stared out the bulletproof window at the winos drinking on the corner by the boarded-up grocery.
Of course, nobody believed that Zig had actually seen the mayor. Ziggy had been unreliable even before Pepper Rosado had accidentally beaned him during a game of “it” with the bat. People still remembered as far back as third grade when Ziggy had jumped up in the middle of mass yelling, “Didja see her? She nodded! I asked the Blessed Virgin would my cat come home and she nodded yes!”
All through grade school the statues of saints winked at Ziggy. He was in constant communication with angels and the dead. And Ziggy sleepwalked. The cops had picked him up once in the middle of the night for running around the bases in Washtenaw Playground while still asleep.
When he’d wake up, Ziggy would recount his dreams as if they were prophecies. He had a terrible recurring nightmare in which atomic bombs dropped on the city the night the White Sox won the pennant. He could see the mushroom cloud rising out of Comiskey Park. But Zig had wonderful dreams, too. My favorite was the one in which he and I and Little Richard were in a band playing in the center of St. Sabina’s roller rink.
After Pepper brained him out on the boulevard with a bat — a fungo bat that Pepper whipped like a tomahawk across a twenty-yard width of tulip garden that Ziggy was trying to hide behind — Zig stopped seeing visions of the saints. Instead, he began catching glimpses of famous people, not movie stars so much as big shots in the news. Every once in a while Zig would spot somebody like Bo Diddley going by on a bus. Mainly, though, it would be some guy in a homburg who looked an awful lot like Eisenhower, or he’d notice a reappearing little gray-haired fat guy who could turn out to be either Nikita Khrushchev or Mayor Daley. It didn’t surprise us. Zig was the kind of kid who read newspapers. We’d all go to Potok’s to buy comics and Zig would walk out with the Daily News. Zig had always worried about things no one else cared about, like the population explosion, people starving in India, the world blowing up. We’d be walking along down Twenty-second and pass an alley and Ziggy would say, “See that?”
“See what?”
“Mayor Daley scrounging through garbage.”
We’d all turn back and look but only see a bag lady picking through cans.
Still, in a way, I could see it from Ziggy’s point of view. Mayor Daley was everywhere. The city was tearing down buildings for urban renewal and tearing up streets for a new expressway, and everywhere one looked there were signs in front of the rubble reading:
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE
ANOTHER IMPROVEMENT
FOR A GREATER CHICAGO
RICHARD J. DALEY, MAYOR
Not only were there signs everywhere, but a few blocks away a steady stream of fat, older, bossy-looking guys emanated from the courthouse on Twenty-sixth. They looked like a corps of Mayor Daley doubles, and sometimes, especially on election days, they’d march into the neighborhood chewing cigars and position themselves in front of the flag-draped barbershops that served as polling places.
But back to blight.
That was an expression we used a lot. We’d say it after going downtown, or after spending the day at the Oak Street Beach, which we regarded as the beach of choice for sophisticates. We’d pack our towels and, wearing our swimsuits under our jeans, take the subway north.
“North to freedom,” one of us would always say.
Those were days of longing without cares, of nothing to do but lie out on the sand inspecting the world from behind our sunglasses. At the Oak Street Beach the city seemed to realize our dreams of it. We gazed out nonchalantly at the white-sailed yachts on the watercolor-blue horizon, or back across the Outer Drive at the lake-reflecting glass walls of high rises as if we took such splendor for granted. The blue, absorbing shadow would deepen to azure, and a fiery orange sun would dip behind the glittering buildings. The crowded beach would gradually empty, and a pitted moon would hover over sand scalloped with a million footprints. It would be time to go.
“Back to blight,” one of us would always joke.
I remember a day shortly after blight first became official. We were walking down Rockwell, cutting through the truck docks, Zig, Pepper, and I, on our way to the viaduct near Douglas Park. Pepper was doing his Fats Domino impression, complete with opening piano riff: Bum-pah-da bum-pa-da dummmmm…
Ah foun’ mah thrill
Ahn Blueberry Hill…
It was the route we usually walked to the viaduct, but since blight had been declared we were trying to see our surroundings from a new perspective, to determine if anything had been changed, or at least appeared different. Blight sounded serious, biblical in a way, like something locusts might be responsible for.
“Or a plague of gigantic, radioactive cockroaches,” Zig said, “climbing out of the sewers.”
“Blight, my kabotch,” Pepper said, grabbing his kabotch and shaking it at the world. “They call this blight? Hey, man, there’s weeds and trees and everything, man. You shoulda seen it on Eighteenth Street.”
We passed a Buick somebody had dumped near the railroad tracks. It had been sitting there for months and was still crusted with salt-streaked winter grime. Someone had scraped WASH ME across its dirty trunk, and someone else had scrawled WHIP ME across its hood. Pepper snapped off the aerial and whipped it back and forth so that the air whined, then slammed it down on a fender and began rapping out a Latin beat. We watched him smacking the hell out of it, then Zig and I picked up sticks and broken hunks of bricks and started clanking the headlights and bumpers as if they were bongos and congas, all of us chanting out the melody to “Tequila.” Each time we grunted out the word tequila, Pepper, who was dancing on the hood, stomped out more windshield.
We were revving up for the viaduct, a natural echo chamber where we’d been going for blues-shout contests ever since we’d become infatuated with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You.” In fact, it was practicing blues shouts together that led to the formation of our band, the No Names. We practiced in the basement of the apartment building I lived in: Zig on bass, me on sax, Pepper on drums, and a guy named Deejo who played accordion, though he promised us he was saving up to buy an electric guitar.