It was a warm Saturday, comfortable enough that I was willing to take the elevated train to the Loop. This far west, the Douglas line is in Vice Lords territory, and if it were any colder, I would have felt completely disadvantaged in the face of a confrontation. I knew an elderly man, once he was attacked on the way home from the Jewel store on Lawrence and Avers. He swung his bag of potatoes and scared the thugs off. If he had had nothing in his arms, he felt certain that they would have killed him.
So on this particular day in mid-October, I found myself again mesmerized by the elevated tracks passing within a baby’s breath of broken homes and failing businesses. As the train slowed before each station, there was time to make out the faded patterns on hanging laundry on the three-flats back porches. It was faded clothing, still considered usable after years of wear, that made me think of the Cook County Clinics. The place I used to call Illinois Research.
I vacated the train at 18th and Paulina, the Sears Tower visible in the distance like a birthmark on the sky. To my dismay, the building housing the clinics was closed on weekends. I was not content simply seeing the rusty walls and chrome doors. It was like watching a potential subplot dissolve in a film. There’s just not a hell of a lot you can do about it.
A security guard came to the glass door and let me enter. My backpack probably made me look like a grad student. We exchanged talk about the weather and my eyes found the lines on the floor. I had an idea of where I was going. The yellow line shot off to the right at the Diagnostic Center in a way that reminded me of the Voyager craft arcing out of the solar system after passing Saturn.
The red line dead-ended at the Pharmacy and another doorway that led to some mysterious place. It was a toss up between the royal blue and the black. I realized that the lines only seemed to jump around if you stared at them without blinking. When I saw the lines as a boy of seven, I was still having neck spasms and could not hold my head straight up like an alert puppet. Sometimes, my father would carry me as if out of a burning building. Released from detailed pain, I would stare intently at the lines from past my father’s beat-patrolman stride.
I was wearing gym shoes, again, my concerns of a confrontation with gang members, and so I did not even have the clocking of heels to mark my passage through the halls.
The room I wanted was numbered 18. Black numerals on an orange door. Fitting Halloween colors. Wooden frame chairs with blue cushions faced the doorway. Overhead lights were arranged in odd molecular patterns. It was the blue line that led to the doorway numbered 18. My father would sit just inside that doorway as the therapist led me further down another hallway.
I peered through the door’s window as if it were a peephole. A new generation of crippled children’s drawings covered a bulletin board, tacked up with white pins. Current role models from television and music. I recall drawing a scene of Martian tripods standing guard over a city in flames.
I have always been secretive of the things I had to do for those thirteen years. I vaguely refer to picking up maroon colored pills that were flat on one side and putting them into a tiny-necked bottle. Doing “airplanes,” that is, balancing my arms and legs in the air while my torso lay on the floor mat. Climbing steps. Descending the steps I had climbed.
I thought again of my father staring at the ceiling. He would invariable be doing this when the therapist brought me back out, and we would surprise him because I was never as loud as some of the other children. My father stared at the ceiling because he was praying. My father stared at the ceiling because he did not care to watch the show about the fugitive pursuing a one-armed man.
A one-armed man seen fleeing the scene of the crime. My father had his pursuits. I had the scene of the crime in front of me. The crime was never knowing what to say.
I did not look at my watch. I saw track lighting and knew that no one could stare at the ceiling for long anymore.
I had a full day ahead of me and went back to the remaining black line, assuming it would take me to a place that I could actually exit from.
II. Shots Downed, Officer Fired
The call came in the middle of his second hour of delirium, on his first night of furlough.
Cruising down the Federal Street corridor in complete silence; no partner, no drug-sniffing canines, no cop show theme song with a frenetic beat.
The squad ran beautifully, a new ’92 Chevy Caprice. Not one gang banger, not a single hustling meth jimmie to eyeball him. When the Lake-Dan Ryan elevated coasted two blocks down and three stories into the night sky, it was like a new-fangled fancy painting, squares of hospital glare; white against the lakefront’s summer turquoise.
Not one soul on board the four cars of the “B” train. Again, he was alone.
The city: his.
He pulled the squad over. Climbed out, stretched in the night air. He heard distant shots fired, felt them like pulses in his forehead when the nights were more humid, also feeling as if the gunfire did not concern him. Moved away from the car in a sliding motion.
Embarrassed; his starched shirttail flapping in the wind like ghetto laundry, his bony knees pale in the summer moonlight. The wind stank of whiskey. His police-issued black socks were soaked when he walked through a puddle near the corner of Thirty-Ninth.
His size-ten feet left wet, sloppy prints in the shag carpeting.
Fumbled with the buttons, trying to put the shirttails back into his blue and white striped jockey shorts. Flaccid head of his dick bent and caught to the right side of the flap. He would not be reprimanded for this apparent lapse in the dress code.
This was Chicago, and he was a twenty-seven-year veteran. When they know you’ve seen enough—the ’72 Midway crash, the ’68 Democratic Convention, the body bags in the crawlspace on Summerdale—then the others cover for you. Police take care of their own, he thought. Weaving proudly. Thinking of a face melted into the springs of the airline seat in front of him, the plane missing the airport by fourteen city blocks. Back then, he drank Drewrey’s.
Again, shots. He did not hear them as they were being fired, but he heard the breaking of glass. Sounding like a bulb that had been dropped, rather than exploded.
The street slid open next to him. His hand gripped the nozzle in his holster. The gun weighed more than he had thought and he could not pull it free.
The streetlights flickered. Briefly, he saw his own reflection. Then he was face-to-face with his son. He must have come down here to buy his own drugs. Not enough to tough it out like The Old Man. Always talking like he had a candy asshole.
“Dad, c’mon.” Maybe a bit of a slur in the son’s voice, as well. “Let’s lay back down, okay?” What the hell was he talking about? He was out here in the streets every damn night while his son stayed home and wrote stories and slept until noon.
“C’mon, Dad. You can vacuum in the morning.” The closed door slid wider and he saw the rest of the bedroom. He tried to balance himself, standing on a pile of his wife’s old shoes and forgotten clothing, garments that had fallen from the hangers.
“Let go of the vacuum.”
Stern voice with The Old Man. Takes enough shit from Division. Don’t need it from the candy-ass.
He put up resistance, the way the academy taught him a stripped-away lifetime ago. The department drove Mercurys back then, it had been three years before he had to answer a call for Shots fired, officer down, all units in the vicinity respond. Knocked his son back, the candy-ass falling flat on his bony butt in the middle of the beige street.
“Damn you,” his only son said. “Back into bed, before Mom gets home. You stink worse than those damn black socks.” The younger man stood up and brushed dog hairs from his jeans.