Sniper in the Mist

By Joseph Cigan

© Copyright by the author 2008

Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon
Show nothing but confusion; ey’d awry
Distinguish form.

– Richard II (Act II, Scene ii)

Prelude: An illusion

It really is a strange world if you think at all about it. Consider, for instance, the fact that you can lie on your back on a clear summer night and look at the sky with a billion stars suspended ad infinitum. You’re gazing at this unchanging canvas with pinpricks of light popping through and, though its immensity is palpable — vertiginous even if you’re not careful — it is nonetheless a surety, something you can count on, maybe even something to believe in. Except that it might be one of the greatest illusions of all, a deceit on a cosmic scale as you learn that perhaps countless of these faithful stars have blinked their last twinkle as much as a 100 million years ago, are now dim red dwarfs or have been sucked into a black hole. This panoply of light may no longer even exist and certainly not in the form in which your unwitting eyes perceive it. What’s worse, though, is when a supernova, that shriek of light created by the most spectacular event in the universe, travels for eons through space and time until finally, billions of years later, it reaches our sun and eight minutes later it sparks in the night over my garden. And I happen just minutes before to have turned away from my stargazing to walk back to the house as a slight shiver from the cooling air raises my shoulders and briefly shakes the back of my neck.

Chapter 1: The Broadway Gang

Some of the most violent guys in the neighborhood were in the Broadway Gang. Broadway, from a block or two south of Belmont to Buckingham going north, was where they mostly hung out. In the middle of this strip was the Nettlehorst School playground where there was almost always a pickup basketball game going on even back in the early Sixties before Michael made the average Chicagoan a fan of the game. They were the smallest social group in the area but pound for pound some of the meanest. Southern White Appalachians, to be politically correct, but very urbanized; they sometimes referred to each other with a smirk as hill-Williams. Slicked back hair – blond or red – with pompadours, short sleeve Ban-Lon shirts tight against their wiry white arms, creased chinos over Cuban toed shoes and Ray-Ban type shades that cut into their chiseled Scots-Irish cheekbones distinguished them big-time from the rest of the neighborhood.

The winters were pretty cold back then. Winds slashing down from somewhere in Canada would cut through the streets like a dull straight razor. It didn’t matter how severe the weather might get though, these boys would never wear more than a light Fifties style jacket or a black London Fog raincoat. Sometimes you might see them in a T shirt walking through the snow and ice to pick up a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls. Some preferred Lucky Strikes shorts; maybe because they could easily roll them up in their tee shirt sleeves in the summer.

Whenever you had to walk down Broadway, which was the main drag with all the drug stores, cleaners, modest little restaurants and the I.G.A Supermarket, you had these guys in the back of your mind hoping that you wouldn’t run into them. Usually it meant just crossing the street, but somehow they seemed to have a weird sixth sense about who feared them, some animal cunning, and maybe they would come across and fuck with you anyway. Not the toughest guys ’cause they had bigger fish to fry but the young studs who still had something to prove. For the most part though, they kicked each other’s asses and sometimes so brutally that the stories would leak down to us and add to their notoriety. Rob Barker, the guy with the crow bar scar where his neck and shoulder met, once jumped up on a table at Buddy’s, the Lake View High School dive where all the bad asses hung out for lunch, and growled “I’m feeling bad, anybody here feel worse?” Someone threw a bottle at him and the rumble was on.

One block to the east along Lake Shore Drive forming a welcome windbreak from the wintry gusts off Lake Michigan were mid-rises with classic 1930s style apartments leased by Jewish and Anglo professionals as well as jewelers, furriers and liquor salesmen. Two blocks in the other direction, past Halsted Street, was the Puerto Rican neighborhood with Nando’s little grocery on one corner of Halsted and Arroyo’s one block up on another. This area, at Roscoe and Halsted, was the turf of the Latin Eagles, the neighborhood gang with Tiger, Babyface, Black Tony, Chuito, Coco, Flako and their “minister of information,” Freddie Feliciano, who always stopped to shoot the shit with us and drop the latest word on the scene. Freddie had the hip-hop moves down, with his arms and hands to his chest, shoulders rolled forward to emphasize and expostulate, ya unerstan’, before there was such a thing.

We all went to school together at Nettelhorst, the Jewish kids from east of Broadway, the Puerto Ricans from the west, the Broadway guys, the kids of the Nisei – first-generation Japanese – and a general smattering of European immigrants along with regular Americans. At the Nettlehorst Friday night dances there was more than one Jewish girl amorada with a Latino and more than one noble fight between a Johnston and a Fernandez over a buxom Shaller beauty. It was a totally level playing field when it came to that, no advantage for ethnicity just the natural boon of boldness, cool and looks coming to the fore although the Anglos and Polish guys might claim an unfair edge by the Latinos ’cause of their underdog appeal. The girls were drawn, come to think of it, to the Mediterranean type it seemed and why not? While I was hanging back against the wall, my buddy Harry, tall and cool in his black turtleneck, was dancing to Johnny Mathis with the finest chicks. A Greek Cypriot father and a Puerto Rican mother gave him a lifetime of psychological turmoil and the looks of a Shark from “West Side Story.” Who could resist? Even I thought Harry was cool.

Of all the guys who loosely made up the Broadway Gang, Barker was the most unstable and the most feared. I ran into Barker with a couple of friends of mine on Broadway one afternoon a few years later. He was actually friendly and showed an interest in us. He probably figured us an easy avenue to pussy and drugs being that we had shoulder length hair and all. He offered up the notion that he and I get a crib together. I figured that was kind of like Attila the Hun rooming with a member of the Vienna Boy’s Choir. I had the creepy feeling that there might have been something else on his mind. Some of his boys were known for baiting homosexuals, “fishin’ for faggots,” around Diversey and Clark Street and then rolling them for their money after a blowjob. A couple of the guys even had the use of an apartment that belonged to one of the aging queens in the area. I couldn’t help thinking that there may have been just a thin line between the sexual preferences of some of them and those of their victims. There was a story that went around, may have been anecdotal or some variation of urban myth, about one of the guys, supposedly Ron Morse, trying to roll a drunk queer he had picked up in a bar on Clark Street.

Morse walked into the joint, the story went, leading with his left shoulder, his fists extended into his coat pockets drawing the fabric of the thigh length sharkskin coat taut against his hunched shoulders. Several pairs of eyes turned to the door and followed him as he entered, sharp and unexpected, like a blade between the ribs. His shoulders thrust forward, a threat beneath his turned up dark gray collar, he moved across the floor like the shadow of “The Third Man” and crossed a sign that warned the unwary “You have entered The Manhole.” As he approached the bar, he reached inside his breast pocket, pulled out a Pall Mall, spun a bar stool around and sat down with his face in profile to the rest of the room. His dishwater blond hair slicked back except for the ringlets which coiled pointedly down to the center of his forehead, he patted his pockets looking for a light and came up empty. He rested his elbow on the bar for a couple of seconds, hand wrapped over the cigarette, until a guy slid up and snapped open a Zippo, stroked the flint wheel with his thumb and with an unsteady hand offered him a light. Morse leaned just slightly forward to accept it as the guy cupped his other hand around the front of the cigarette and bent his hips forward provocatively. Morse took a long drag, flicked a piece of tobacco off his lip with his tongue and said nothing; did not offer even a glance at the guy.

The dude with the light had a broad face and a broad mustache, trimmed and auburn like the Marlboro Man’s. His head terminated abruptly with a short flattop, thick as a brush. He pulled over a barstool and awkwardly leaned back onto it exhaling a grunt of bourbon breath. Resting his elbow on the bar, he leaned back at a languid cant and faced Morse who remained disinterested blowing smoke through his nose after another long drag.

They left the bar together about ten minutes later. As they cut through an alley connecting Broadway and Clark, Morse drifted back a step, pulled his right hand flashing with brass knuckles out of his coat pocket, raised it over the back of the butch cut guy’s head and snapped it down in a compact arc. But he only grazed his head. Pretty loaded, the man had staggered opportunely avoiding the treacherous swipe. He sobered quickly enough as he realized what was happening, stepped back and spun around adroitly to face Morse. His back against the common brick wall at the rear of the triangular building pointing southeast towards the Loop, towards downtown and the Great South Side of Chicago, he licked the smirk on his lips and declared “there’s only one thing I love more than sucking cock and that’s kickin’ ass.” He proceeded to wipe the asphalt with Ron Morse’s ass, making good on his claim.

The last time I saw him, Morse still lived in the neighborhood and routinely walked around the block two or three times before entering his house in case he was being followed. His was the worst case of methedrine paranoia that I had ever seen. Actually, his concoction of choice was more likely diet pills, 30 Desoxyn, soaking in a plastic vial of water to a golden liquor and then mainlined for an instant rush the likes of which took your breath away and filled you with an aura of complete relevance, a sensation of supreme validation. Harry, who briefly imagined that he was a poet, was functionally illiterate but after a taste from 30 soaking, would spend the evening, night and well into the next morning constructing verse while the rest of us were content to jam on one song for the same duration. I played my unplugged hollow body Framus base from which I had removed the frets and sanded down the neck so that it played more like a bass fiddle while Harry’s brother George played guitar and sang. Steve Rowman also played guitar and Ray Sandoval hit the congas. Tim Mullins, graduate of the Broadway Gang and who now embraced the values of peace and love, worked all night at a table in the kitchenette like a Swiss watchmaker cleaning and prepping the needle for the next draw from the golden vial. Uncanny how a large platelet could block the orifice in a #24 needle and how adept “the Doctor” ultimately became at disengaging it.

This episode did not go on for long, thank you. We all dropped out of the sordid mess one way or another and the sooner the better. We lost more brain cells than any of us could afford. Had we had more to begin with, we would never have put them at hazard. I seem to remember that it was William Burroughs who bragged that after 20 years of heroin abuse he still felt that he was creative, that his vital essence was not destroyed. I doubt that anybody who did any form of methamphetamines seriously for 20 weeks could make the same claim.

Ray stopped when he was drafted and headed for basic training and then to ‘Nam despite his claims of conscientious objection. I stopped after I found myself walking home in a desolate rain early one morning, on one of my comedowns, weeping without reason. Embarrassed and suddenly extremely self-conscious, my sensible side, such as it was, which often saved me from my more maudlin proclivities became disgusted enough to rebel with a vengeance. It was not a pretty sight, the interior of my skull, as I flagellated myself sardonically: “You simple, pussy-ass son of a bitch, you were a fucking genius last night in your brilliant (and redundant) radiance, weren’t you? A fucking Shakespeare and Mozart rolled into one, yeah. But this morning, you whimperin’ like a little pussy chump ’cause you so depressed. Boohoo motherfucker, welcome to the land of the strung out, and you can take your sorry sensitive ass and park it right where all the other motherfuckin’ losers crawl, the gutter – chump!”

I never touched the shit again.

It was hard to sort it all out when I reflected on it. There was so much going on within the space of a few square blocks. Some of my people were “cool in Astrakhan,” I mused, though almost always in the crosshairs of a wretched, metaphoric sniper, like Dean Barrera who struggled unsuccessfully with his sanity. Dean was cursed with a father, a Panamanian chemist working on enzyme research for a detergent manufacturer, whose beatings of him stopped when he finally abandoned Dean and his long-suffering Greek-American mother. A couple of years later I actually saw her smile a few times but it would be, alas, a short-lived respite in her stream of anguish as the worst was yet to come.

The sniper is an insidious weapon of war; so effective in terms of eliminating enemy assets and creating psychological havoc that it cannot be dismissed from one’s arsenal yet also, most often, so wretchedly arbitrary in its choice of targets as to corrupt the rationale of its use.

Dean was picked off by schizophrenia – his arbitrary assassin. Camouflaged by his own psychic cover, he was betrayed in the end like a 19-year-old cherry grunt in the Mekong Delta by a mamasan with her baby strapped to her breast and a grenade to her arm. My last encounter with him included a horizontal tango as we rolled in each other’s arms on the sidewalk and into the middle of Broadway in front of the Nettelhorst playground.

I hadn’t seen Dean in over a year and ran into him on Broadway. He walked up to me with a practiced pigeon-toed stride that shifted the center of his gravity slightly forward while still ramrod straight through his back and neck. His dull brown hair, like the color of Montrose Beach sand in the winter, swept across one lens of his black glasses and covered his right eye. He led with his nose, a beak-like proboscis with flared nostrils that seemed to sniff the scene with an air of disdain. With a cold, dilated eye, Dean nodded once as he rocked back on his heels in cool appraisal of me. “Say, Varga,” he said as he pulled his hands out of his pockets and cold-cocked me in the jaw. As I staggered, dropped my glasses and bent over to pick them up, Dean, like a punter, gauged and drop-kicked his shoe into my face, which luckily glanced off my cheek. I fought him off reluctantly, half-heartedly because I knew Dean wasn’t right. He wasn’t a thug and he couldn’t have anything against me, I insisted. We had run away together to New Orleans in a rock ‘n roll band when we were 15 years old for cryin’ out loud. All I could do was grab him and pull him to the ground as the guys in the schoolyard hooted and howled egging us on, thinking that it was a real fight with some real issue to settle. We rolled into the street stopping traffic, adults yelling at us disgustedly . . . as if we had a choice in the matter. I finally disengaged myself and started walking home, confused and sensing fear finally rising in me as Dean followed several feet behind. He continued talking to me, waxing almost philosophic, explaining in a dialectic all his own, about the discovery while recently institutionalized, that he was capable of inflicting injury on someone; that it was really, all in all, very simple. “It’s kinda cool, Varga, all you got to do is see yourself doin’ it and then go ‘head and do it. You were always too scared to fight so I had to show you how.” I wonder if in his wigged out reality Dean hadn’t, to his satisfaction, somehow reduced the violence perpetrated so randomly in our environment and so methodically by his father into a newly tenable and even reasonable facet of his personality disorder.

He was institutionalized again not long after and I never really followed up on him although I heard years later that not much in his status had changed. Some mix of tragic elements, the abrupt end of a relationship with a much older woman hence the loss of a confidant, mentor and lover, the sordid, brutish and unanticipated sexual aggression of an older and eccentric male acquaintance of ours and the use of speed which was a lethal combination with his already hyperactive mind all contributed to the dissolution of his sanity. Dean’s particularly tenuous state of mind after the loss of the “sweet sticky thing,” his woman, was further assaulted when he was betrayed by the sexual predator who had ingratiated himself into his unwitting trust. He was a rich boy piano student from Nebraska studying at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. Dean and I played music with him when he sat in on jam sessions that we’d have. I made him as an eccentric and somewhat vulnerable soul, brain-fucked by daddy and trying to break free. I felt guilty later for being so naïve, for not discerning the prurient nature of his interest in us. It wasn’t Nebraska’s orientation, it was the duplicity, the perfidy of preying on an innocent that pissed me off. But in the end, Dean’s use of amphetamines was the final ingredient in a formula for disaster.

I woke in the morning in our apartment in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, and saw Dean sitting on the living room floor, his sticks snapping faster than the eye could see, doing drum rolls on his thighs. Dean announced, matter-of-factly, that he had just sat up all night thinking about things and working out beats on his legs. This was well before any of us had touched a non-prescription drug.

The five of us in the band, underage runaways, shared this apartment. It was the winter of 1967-68, the year of the great Chicago snow storm that left the city’s major traffic arteries paralyzed. Even Lake Shore Drive was so covered with huge snow drifts that buses were stranded and finally abandoned at odd angles in the middle of that busy thoroughfare. The scene was fantastic, a bit surrealistic, and two days after the snow stopped falling, the Drive was still impassable. In this storm of the century setting, five of us – earnest pop musicians that we were – made our way in several cabs to Union Station. We loaded all our equipment – guitars, amplifiers, microphones and drum kit – onto baggage gondolas and waited on the main floor in the grand expanse of the train station.

The floor of the huge waiting room consisted of several thousand square feet of white Carrara marble from which rose columns of the same material. They towered, pompous and intimidating, as they shot toward the dome ceiling six stories above the pew-like benches made of dark oak. These benches had been thoughtfully curved for comfort at all the edges by their designer. We sat on them, each absorbed in the gravity of our adventure, trying to blend into the normal bustle of the station so as not to reveal our covert status as runaways.

We finally boarded the Louisville-Nashville Line with a confidence belying our fear of discovery by some nosy cop who may have wondered why we weren’t in school. We stashed our considerable baggage wherever we could. The train began its serpentine and excruciatingly slow journey to New Orleans meandering, it seemed, through every town south of Memphis before finally turning west at the gulf in Mobile, chugging through Biloxi and into the Crescent City.

We were on our own in New Orleans, our own for the first time in our lives in a town as foreign to us as if we had been put down in Moscow or Marrakech. Oh, the houses and streets were all suburban-like and the cars were familiar but the people and their openness, the way they simply came up to you, looked you in the eye and asked you almost anything was refreshing and unnerving at the same time. Algiers was just another suburb of an American city, or was it? Despite the candor of the people, there seemed to ripple just below surface appearances something precarious, undetected but hinted at, its spoor just discovered and then easily lost again as you approached, like a mirage of water shimmering in the distance over a black ribbon of highway. Maybe it had something to do with the knowledge that this small islet on the west bank of the Mississippi along with its neighboring town of Gretna had traditionally been a place where the practice of the old religion was common? Shango and Eshu, Elegua and Yemayá, the old slave deities had also made that middle passage from Africa. Often disguised as Catholic saints, they were worshipped, consulted and supplicated in the wetlands surrounding Gretna and Algiers.

Known as Santeria in Cuba, Macumba and Umbanda in Brasil, and Vundun or Voodoo in Haiti and New Orleans, the syncretic cultural remnants of the West African Diaspora still colored the dreams and shaped the edges of memory in those communities. The Yoruban divinities, called Orishas, followed their enslaved peoples to the New World. These Orishas crossed the ocean to protect their people and jealously demand of them their proper and time-honored obeisance. Much like the ancient Greek gods, these African deities enjoyed and essentially required active contact with their people exhibiting all of the vices and virtues inherent in them. Oludumare, the supreme god who distributed to all the others Aché, the life force in nature, Yemayá the goddess of the sea and mother to all the Orixas, Ellegua the trickster, Shango, born to make war and who loved rum and cigars, Ochun, goddess of fertility and sensuality and lover of honey and Obatalá, the Orixa who created humans, all ascended and retreated in importance depending on the sphere of influence or the personal circumstance of their devotees as they jealously demanded the attention of their people.

Something inside, maybe it was an unconscious connection to my own ancestors, resonated with the immediacy and accessibility of the Orixas. My nomadic, abstract-primitive ancestors sweeping across the Asian steppes were tied to the totems of their tribal identity and not to the fetishes of technology that engaged more agrarian and land-harnessed cultures. Not tethered to the lands that they moved through like a tempest looking for game and better grazing for their horses, they were nonetheless subject to basic individual and cultural imperatives not the least of which demanded a continuity of and an anchoring in a belief system. So, created in their dreams was a sympathetic demiurge suited to their nomadic life which in turn created their gods.

I was fascinated by the call and response vocals in the drum circles that formed by the Bird Sanctuary in Lincoln Park along Lake Michigan during the summer. Votive offerings to the Orishas by the voices of the Puerto Rican congueros transformed this small stand of trees adjacent to towering urban monoliths into primeval African rain forest. Rhythm, lore, legend and magic drew everyone that passed by as they felt the irresistible beat of the drum. And then, skimming like a sultry breeze, like an African scirocco on percussive waves, a flute enthralled the unsuspecting passerby. Ethereal, undulating around the voices and then suddenly bluesy with the guttural stylings I had learned listening to Rahsaan Roland Kirk, my flute became integral to the musical alchemy we created on those enchanted afternoons.

My interest aroused, I read what I could about the passage of this culture from the old world of Africa to the new in Brazil, Cuba and the other Caribbean islands. In some small measure, the Yoruban culture was salvaged in these lands by a different approach to the wretched business of slavery compared to that in America.

The simple fact that drums were not forbidden to the slaves in these Latin countries was profoundly important in maintaining the musical and cultural connection with their homeland and, when exposed to Portuguese and Spanish songs, it became the music of the islands and coastal areas of most of Latin America. This Afro-Cuban music made a circle back to Mother Africa in the sense that Portuguese and Spanish music was certainly influenced hundreds of years earlier by the Moors who established in Iberia, centered in Cordoba, one of the great cultures and at the time, arguably, the highest in Europe. The irony was that, in America, the denial of the drum and the calculated mixing of tribes in order to discourage communication through a common language thus making them less likely to revolt, contributed to a different synthesis of African and European sensibilities: blues and then jazz.

This blending also occurred in religion. Catholicism, most often so brutally forced upon these Africans, also serendipitously lent itself to preserving the Yoruban religious practices and hence some of their culture. With all of the many Saints and rituals in the Catholic Church, slaves were able to disguise their ceremonies and sacraments by seemingly practicing Catholicism. They substituted saints that corresponded to the Orixas. In time their faith in the church became sincere but so also did their belief remain in the Babalawo and the Madrina, priest and priestess in the oracle Orixas.

Dancing on the beaches to the suspended light of a billion stars reflected in the candles spread along the sand to their mother Yemayá, the Goddess of the Sea, these dark angels raised their bodies and their voices to the easterly wind skimming across the ocean from Africa.

Chapter 2: Memories . . .

. . . of shopkeeper’s violins, a sentimental muezzin, escape in the night

When I think of that early spring in New Orleans, it confirms and justifies my abhorrence of April in Chicago. “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most”* must have been written about expectations raised and then brutally dashed, one frigid rainy and windy day after another, on the rocks along Lake Michigan, under the endless gray canopy that stretches from late March until the middle of June.

In contrast, I remember spring as a child, seven or eight years old, when I stopped at the corner on my way to school and absorbed a morning so immaculate that I closed my eyes and inhaled the slight, perfumed breeze. Immersed so thoroughly in la primavera’s thrall, I walked to school that morning but don’t recall how. I only remember the pristine morning light and the fragrance.

At the time, we lived in the westernmost section of the Pilsen neighborhood at Damen between Cermak and Blue Island Avenue on the near south side of Chicago. Formerly Czech and Slovak, now Polish and quickly turning Mexican, it included typical Chicago style bungalows as well as three-flats with concrete stairs facing the street. Many of the brick buildings were smothered with paint effectively choking the masonry units required to breathe no less than their inhabitants. By virtue of the specially leavened clay, kneaded by repeated ice ages moving south at a rate of several feet per day, and their kiln-fired rites of passage, these Chicago bricks proudly stacked up to any in the world. A billion and more strong, buttered with mortar by trowels so precisely wielded by the toughest-skinned German, Slav and Italian hands that it was poetry in motion, not a wasted move or a superfluous stroke. A good mason would lay at least 800 brick a day and up to 1,000 when everything fell right in place, when the laborers fed the mortar seamlessly and mixed it to just the right slump. To slap on a coat of paint because it was cheaper than tuckpointing was a slap in the face to these maestros.

We lived in one of these paint-choked three-flats, above an Austrian family and below the landlord Dusan, a Serb. This house and the neighborhood still return to my thoughts, profoundly carved memories that surface uncannily, stirring melodies from songs nearly forgotten and lingering provocatively like a hook from a song by Ivan Lins. This was where I once spit and hit a fly in midair and even then I fully understood, awed by the sheer arithmetic improbability, that only a slight tear in the fabric of reality could allow to slip through such a fantastic thing, rarer than diamonds in Irkutsk or sea salt in Kansas. From the vantage of Dusan’s third floor rear porch I surveyed the entire neighborhood like a muezzin, who in a minaret in Old Sarajevo preparing to call the faithful to prayer, might pause to absorb the view and dream of ancient Byzantium. Lit in amber, gold and red by the amiably disposed western sun, I peered at the dome of St. Stephen’s to the east. The reflecting copper glinting warm and familiar, I let my eyes drift westward basking in their reflected benevolence. Humble working class homes on streets sparsely dotted with autos transformed into an Eastern European hamlet in which characters from an Isaac Bashevis Singer story colored the background like the veins and fissures in a slab of Opera Fantastico marble.

And if one were beside me on Dusan Savic’s porch and allowed one’s eyes to drift west, the sharply rising twin spires of St. Paul’s would unexpectedly pierce them. Austere, cutting in their sheer pitch and bold in their symmetry, they rose to a height unsurpassed by any church in the area. A Gothic reminder of sober duty, solemn piety and earnest obedience to the Highest of the High until suddenly and dazzling the sun poured through between the towers and delighted in its own adoration of Deity. And I, like the sentimental muezzin, might have proclaimed “Allahu Akbar” as I sucked on yet another sugar cube dipped in the robust Turkish coffee set on a china plate with delicate gold edging that Dusan’s darkly clothed and babushka’d wife had left for me.

My imagination now soaring, the alley below then shape-shifted to the Danube River in Old Beograd suddenly running red in the setting sunlight with the blood of its defenders, Serbs, defeated and humiliated by the Turk at Kosovo Polje (“field of blackbirds”).

The river is moving. The Blackbird must be flying.

– ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (Wallace Stevens, American poet)

The only obstacle left standing now to the Turk was Janos Hunyadi, the legendary Hungarian champion and thus Suleiman’s finest were turned away at the gates of Vienna.

The small street perpendicular to the alley was the Danube running through the Magyar capital with Pest on the right and Buda on the left. The dog rummaging through the garbage cans must be the German shepherd named Hussar owned and beloved by my mother’s family in Pest when she was a young girl. This dog, as loyal as the best young Janissary to Suleiman himself, would guard my grandmother as she slept – one eye on a fly that dared to buzz and perhaps disturb her dreams. My mother fondly recalled how they would send him to the butcher shop with a note in a basket clenched between his teeth and how he always returned with sausage and chops untouched.

Hussar was an exceptional and loyal German shepherd like the one owned by our Polish neighbor on Coulter Street in Pilsen. Rumor in the neighborhood was that this Mr. Flig, the owner of the tiny delicatessen next door, had sicced the dog on a woman with whom he had had a disagreement. Flig was tall, robustly built with a postage stamp mustache and a barrel chest. A man of few words and even fewer means it seemed since his tiny store was never busy. I was sent by my mother for our daily fresh unseeded rye bread and always felt guilty that we did not purchase more items there.

Flig was aloof with a sardonic curl to his upper lip as his squared-off small brush of a mustache seemed about to slide off were it not for its grip on that twist of his mouth. He stood erect and preoccupied in the back of the store behind the case filled with sausages wearing his long white butcher’s apron; not someone who deigned to engage in small talk and friendly chatter with a nine-year-old boy. I would always enter the store feeling as though I had stepped across a threshold into some dim lit ancestral past, the air thick with the aroma of Old World shopkeeper culture and a familiar comfort. And once in a while, transfigured as I peered towards the shadows in the back of the store, I would behold John Flig, violin tucked under his chin and arm extended with bow, playing some plaintive song as he stood behind his sausage counter oblivious to everything but his instrument and the process of pulling from it the most poignant sounds possible. Whenever Mr. Flig played, his wife waited on customers; some inviolable agreement between them I supposed.

When I entered the store with my mother I would stand next to her shifting weight from one foot to another, politely patient as I listened to their conversation in English. Mother spoke in a heavily accented and, at that time, rudimentary English while Mr. Flig, slightly unctuous and with a Polish accent, had a much better command of the language. His wife was a bit more solicitous when speaking to her.

As a child, I had always thought of my mother as especially beautiful. This was reinforced often by my friends’ and teachers’ comments. I realized later how young my mother was at that time and how very different her life in America might have been had she not insulated herself from the influences and possibilities that existed for her in this new world. My father had much to do with that. The battle with his demons shaded the darker side of the chiaroscuro that lit and dimmed the theater of her life. Her oblique journey from the light of an urbane Budapest, which still wore vestiges of a fin de siecle Viennese culture, through the dark terror of her father’s murder during the Russian occupation, from safety and light in a remote corner of rural Slovenia where she was sent to live with relations and to forestall contact with those rampaging Russians and again through a dim despair as she escaped with husband, two-year-old son and six-month-old daughter to a refugee camp in Austria – these scenes, reflections in her cerulean eyes, set the stage for her ultimate arrival in Chicago.

My father had been at the fire bombing of Dresden in 1945 standing guard duty outside the city as it burned. Conscripted into the German army from Slovenia, he stood guard, stoic as a sixteen-year-old could be, on the edge of a conflagration that devoured this ancient and historic city. Engorged by the flow of refugees gathering from the east ahead of the advancing Red Army bent on revenge, Dresden had swelled from 600,000 to perhaps twice that number. Notorious in its profound disregard for collateral damage, that being, in fact, the only goal of the concerted attack, 15 square kilometers in the heart of this jewel of baroque architecture and the center of historic Saxony was reduced to rubble and ash that evening. It pales in atrocity when compared to the calculated murder of the Nazis or the rocket attacks against London yet remains one of the darker days in human history.

How many people died that night will never be known but the estimates range from 90,000 to 120,000. With the end of the war in sight, no military or industrial targets to speak of and the city overflowing with refugees, the moral or even strategic implications of this joint British and American fire bombing raid will be pondered for as long as historians, to their credit, continue to find value in these reflections.

Inside the city, Kurt Vonnegut trembled miserably in Slaughterhouse Five, his makeshift cell, while my father rearranged the entire philosophical and emotional terrain of his young mind, his innocence leaking from his burning, swollen and weeping eyes. Years later, he would tell me that on that evening he lost his religion and a part of his mind. A stint in an American prisoner of war camp in southern France soon followed that seminal event in his young life.

Only two images from the experiences in that camp burned in his memory vividly enough to betray his reticence on the subject, troublesome as they were to relate to his son in a rare moment of bonding between us. One was the consequence of the craving for a smoke by one of the German prisoners huddled for the night in a pile of sleeping bodies in the center of the yard. The no-smoking rule was enforced by the report of an M1 rifle fired by a guard. Aimed at the burning red ash in the amorphous human pile, the shot echoed its warning in the moaning, through most of the night, by the miserable mope that caught the cigarette-seeking missile. Whether it was the smoker’s body or that of a guy with even worse luck that was collected in the morning and removed in a wheelbarrow was never revealed by my father and remained a nagging curiosity of mine.

The other, more disturbing image was that of a young, recently interrogated SS officer, an oberleutnant, standing with feet spread awkwardly, clenching, with one bloody and dripping hand at his belly, the stock of a bayoneted rifle, the blade and muzzle wrapped in his gore protruding from the small of his back. The other arm was thrust forward, aimed two o’clock high at the brilliant Midi morning sky, fingers extended and flat like his palm as he repeated “Heil Hitler” until he collapsed in the dirt and his own blood. If I suspected a grudging respect from my father for this disturbed fanatic it was dispelled by the dismissive and simulated spit on the memory of him with which he terminated the discussion.

Emaciated, conflicted and evermore afflicted with a jaundiced eye to the world, he returned to Yugoslavia after the war ended. On November 29, 1945, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was created with Josip Broz Tito at its head and Communism the dominant political force. The United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union recognized the new government and Tito proceeded to eliminate his opposition and chart a course for Yugoslavia that masterfully navigated its path for the next thirty-five years. Tito guided Yugoslavia away from the Iron Curtain and Soviet influence and domination to become a leader of the non-aligned nations maintaining friendly relations and forming trade agreements with the West as well as the Soviets and China. He kept the lid on the simmering ethnic pot that was Yugoslavia, an artificial union created after World War I at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The lid did not come off nor the pot boil over until more than a decade after Tito’s death in 1980. Jozef Varga Sr., uncertain of his belief in or commitment to the new regime, entered military officer’s training academy where he was quickly enlisted to teach mathematics to his peers.

The Marxist dialectic and particularly the dogmatic and brutish application of it by the dominant Serb culture in the academy were unpalatable, to say the least, to the senior Varga and he was expelled for a lack of revolutionary zeal. He returned to his small town where the local party appointed him manager of the state run general store. He was soon in trouble with the local apparatchiks, however, and when he punched out the local party chief who made a pass at his new wife, my mother, it was only a matter of time.

That time came when there surfaced, curiously, a discrepancy of about $2,000 in the state store ledgers. Varga senior, meticulous in his accounting and innocent, immediately determined a plan of action. He may, in fact, have had a plan for quite a while, a calumny towards him perhaps not completely unanticipated.

“Marika, pack one small suitcase and get the children ready. We’re leaving tonight and we’re not coming back.”

Thus began, indelibly etched in my memory, the short hegira to the frontier and across the border into Austria accomplished in one long evening elongating into dawn of the next day.

A drink of schnapps for good luck with my mother’s cousin and her husband, a short trip on a bus to arrive as close to the border as we could and a chin up, best foot forward lean into a long trek along country roads and through wood and field is how the trip began. We walked, mother carrying my six-month-old baby sister and father with me astride his shoulders all through the evening and far into the night. We stopped to rest occasionally without much concern as these roads were scarcely used at night and I recall a particular crossroads where we stopped to pray. A full-sized crucifix with wooden figure of Jesus guarded this intersection of rural roads and I remember watching my mother kneeling to pray as I sat on my father’s shoulders. While probably comforting to my parents, it was an eerie moment for me with an impenetrable darkness surrounding the edge of the road and the face of Jesus under a crown of thorns staring sadly and it seemed forlornly down at us in the moonlight.

I fell in and out of sleep on my father’s shoulders and woke from one dreamy interlude to the sound of dogs barking. Father accelerated the pace to a double-time trot, pulling my now-exhausted mother by the sleeve of her long overcoat. We were crossing a field recently harvested with corn stalks vertically stacked in a circle against each other forming teepee-like cones scattered haphazardly in our path. My father stopped abruptly at one and, shifting some stalks to reveal the hollow space within, urged my mother to enter. He set the suitcase and me on the ground, entered the corn shelter pulling both in behind him and arranged the stalks to partially cover the entrance. Mother sat cross-legged with my sister in lap as the barking of the dogs gained in volume, the direction of their path now discernible and, if not altered, would skirt past us on one side of the field. My father later explained that the border guards patrolled with German shepherds. My baby sister, Marija, began to cry. Her tiny fingers clutching the large cloth button of my mother’s coat, she started to wail. Mother cupped her mouth with one hand as gently and firmly as she could but that, of course, only made matters worse. What was simply a baby crying in the night seemed like the screaming of an entire nursery of frightened banshees. My mother was finally able to retrieve from the folds of her clothing a breast which she, after several attempts aborted by the baby’s thrashing head, plopped into her mouth. The subsequent and contrasting silence was palpable. It settled with shape and form on our huddled and weary family. My mother prayed that the corn of which she beseeched disguise and concealment would also bestow a cover to damp our sounds.

The intermittent barking of the dogs diminished at every asymmetrical interval and after perhaps ten minutes or so we felt safe enough to continue.

How invaluable, I often thought during my recollections of that flight in the night, would it be to know the thoughts, fears, hopes of my mother and father as they trudged through that memorable night. Did he marvel or stew bitterly over the chain of events that led to this irrevocable choice and that profoundly altered his life and that of his family? What of my mother? Did she panic in a weak moment and rue the day she met this man dragging her and her children through the perilous night. Were they buoyed by anticipation of a freedom and by a sense of possibility that they had never known before? Or, having set this terrifying wheel in motion did they just hang on, white knuckles grasping with stubborn purchase until it arrived at their goal or simply stopped rolling, spent and spinning in ever-diminishing circles until it sputtered to a stop short of their dreams. What, indeed, was at work here, desperation or an imperative to grow beyond some arbitrary limitations set by circumstance and chance? Whatever the motivations that moved these two young people, I concluded that my father shot his wad with this bold enterprise. It was the last noble risk that he would take, his life in America reduced to a series of uninspired compromises, bitter disappointments and resented underachievement.

Determined, driven, with desperation creeping in where fatigue allowed, Varga senior and his hauntingly beautiful woman clutching her baby in her painfully weary arms crossed field after field and arrived at the bank of a small river. We stopped to rest for a few minutes and then senior carried mother and daughter across the waist deep water and deposited them on the other side. He waded back and carried me across as well. He crossed back and forth for the third time to retrieve the luggage and we continued our journey.

Not realizing that our safety was secured when we crossed that river, which was a border between Austria and Yugoslavia, we walked on for some considerable distance, still skirting the farmhouses that more frequently now occurred in our path. Finally, my mother, exhausted to the point of collapse, now barely hanging on to the baby pressed against her body and slowly slipping below her waist, pleaded with my father to stop and take our chances at the farmhouse just off the road. She could not go on and was willing to risk it all on the mercy of that next farmer. And so they did.

His knock on the door produced a middle-aged man, short and balding, tucking his night shirt into his pants. He told them that he could not accommodate them but that the farmer just a short way up the road could. We somehow made it to that kind man’s door. He opened up his home and kitchen providing beds, hot tea, bread and butter. My father and this farmer speaking in German over a glass of plum brandy, called slivovic in Slovene or palinka in Hungarian, spoke animatedly for a half hour or so, the farmer trying to convince senior that we were, indeed, in Austria and safe. I remember this conversation just before I slipped, thoroughly this time, into slumber.

The Austrian authorities were contacted the next day and we were ensconced that evening in a camp consisting of former military barracks. This camp was allocated to accommodate refugees and displaced persons, not a small number of whom migrated to Austria at that time. Mother and father each served four days in jail to comply with Austrian law against illegal entry but were not required to do so simultaneously in consideration of their children.

* * *

My parents had met in Slovenia shortly after my mother’s father had been brutally murdered by some Red Army churls during the Russian occupation of Budapest. Whether sent to specifically arrest my grandfather or whether he simply chose to challenge their boorish and offensive interruption of a farewell party for one of his friends and associates remains unclear, Mother having given different versions of his demise. The story that I chose to believe and the one that colored my impressions of him since I had nothing else to hold on to, having never met him or anyone but my mother that had, is the following:

As a relatively high civil servant in the Hungarian government which was an ally of Germany and of the Nazi regime during World War II, he had much to fear in the occupation of his country by the Russians who moved west towards Germany with an understandable vengeance. I remained disturbed by the thought of the many and perhaps inevitable compromises to his moral convictions that my grandfather might have had to make to comply with, reluctantly implement, but surely not, I prayed, expedite the nefarious, repugnant and criminal agenda of the state. Yet I understood that unless he was conspicuously courageous, heroic even, he could not have been but implicated in at least the tacit approval and complicit in the unchallenged aid and abetting of crimes against humanity. I chose to believe, evidence to the contrary lacking, that he was one of the few members of that regime who found a way, if not to challenge, then to ameliorate the damage. So profound is one’s ability to rationalize, I conclude in more cynical moments.

In the early months of 1945 with the Red Army pushing west and on the verge of entering Budapest, my grandfather Peter had, like all members of government and their functionaries, to leave the city or risk imprisonment or summary execution. Before leaving, he chose to attend a farewell gathering for an associate and lifelong friend. While at this small banquet, amidst one of many toasts to an uncertain future for all in attendance, the doors to the hall slammed open and in swaggered two Russian soldiers with pistols drawn, shouting commands in their own language and firing into the ceiling for emphasis. Peter, who spoke eight languages including fluent Russian, offered up a request that they be more civil and not scare the women and children present. The Russians were not in a mood to mitigate their behavior or accept anything but abject compliance to their demands. The bloody retrieval of a thousand miles and more of Russian territory devastated by German invaders and their lackeys and destroyed by the Russians themselves during their initial retreat in order to slow the German advance was not conducive to any sense of empathy or compassion now that the shoe was on the other foot. Ravaged on a scale perhaps as never before in history, Mother Russia was bled almost dry. Massive waves of Russian defenders, many without a firing weapon, threw themselves at highly mechanized and armed forces, the best in the world, at least in the early years of the war. The sheer number of bodies piled so high in these suicidal assaults that they did, in fact, slow the Germans down, if only briefly. To retrace that bloody route where blood and entrails, torn limbs and bodies crushed by Nazi panzers froze in the mud when the fierce winds howled off the steppes was not a therapeutic exercise that gave them any psychic healing. They came to extract their own pound of flesh and they certainly did in many venues.

The response to Peter’s request was another shot into the ceiling and then a slow turn towards him with the gun swinging in his direction. At that moment, Peter drew his own pistol from under his suit coat and shot each of the two Russians, killing them immediately. He tore from the room into a back hall leading to a rear exit and was shot dead by several other Russians as he came through that door. A minor hero or another example of the “banal evil of ordinary men,” I never really knew. He had balls though, I have to admit.

* * *

Hungarians are an Asian people. Usually, I prefer the term ‘Oriental’ instead of the more politically correct ‘Asian.’ Notwithstanding the likelihood that the genesis of our use of ‘Oriental’ is firmly rooted in a cultural elitism manifest in the Eurocentric orientation of our compass, the Orient is undeniably to the east. It can also be argued, for that matter, that it is to the west, although it would require a much longer argument. Asian, although general, is still somehow too specific geographically. Oriental is much less defining and more intriguing, the difference, perhaps, between the earthy flavor of a dark roasted Arabica coffee and the ephemeral perfume of a Japanese green tea. Hungarians, though, are definitely Asian. Wild Scythian winds from the steppes of Central Asia tore the back door to Europe from its hinges and howling through on their wiry overachieving ponies rode Attila the Hun and Arpad the Magyar. It is said of the Magyar, which is what a Hungarian calls himself in his own language, that he loves only his woman, his horse and his wine and not necessarily in that order. A brooding romantic, even his national poet writes, ‘Amere en jarok meg a fak is sirnak’ – “Where’er I walk even the trees are weeping.”

Hungarian or Magyar is an unwieldy language, not Slavic and unrelated to any other European language except Finnish. I suspect that even the Finnish connection might only be coincidental and therefore a marriage of linguistic convenience performed by an overzealous pedant who abhorred an anomaly. The Basque language is similarly singular in its non-Indo-European origin and its lack of relation to its Romance neighbors. In the case of the speakers of that language, whose two claims to notoriety seem only to be their relish for staying one step ahead of madly snorting bulls careening down the winding streets of Pamplona and the occasional bomb blast in Bilbao or Madrid by another of this forsaken world’s many separatist movements, their linguistic isolation is probably more troublesome given their lack of territorial sovereignty. The Magyar, however, achieved the status of empire by coupling with the Habsburg dynasty forming Austria-Hungary and thus inheriting the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire which as one wag cleverly pointed out was neither holy nor Roman.

My first language is markedly different and cloaked in a multifarious fabric, a tapestry woven with threads to nomadic horsemen traveling thousands of miles and cutting a swath larger than life along their path. It is the language of my mother, soft and soporific, as she reads from an old book of fairy tales with pages turned sepia and illustrated in black line. Not Grimm’s or Anderson’s or Mother Goose’s but simple stories about one of three daughters, for example, who when asked to express her love for her father, the king, is disowned and banished when she replies that she loves him like a man loves salt. She is, of course, ultimately vindicated and restored to her father’s affection, her modest homage to her father proving sincere in its simplicity.

My mother read us stories of rowdy and violent revelers who ignore repeated requests by men of pomp and circumstance to cease their raucous carousing in the tavern and who quit and slip quietly into the night and to their homes when asked the same by a young girl whose sweet old mother lies deathly ill next door. They were stories not about enchanted princesses and evil hags but of ugly ducklings and little match girls succumbing to a cold, indifferent night.

It is the language in which my mother told of the endless battles with the Turks and of the hill not far from my grandmother’s hilltop farm in Slovenia where if you dig carefully you might still find bone shards and other remnants of a battle; remains of Magyar and Slovene defenders mercilessly cut down by Ottoman scimitars wielded by one of the great armies in history careeening like a juggernaut through a fragmented Europe. The Oriental music, brassy and discordant to local ears, played by the band attached to the martial, seemingly endless columns of seasoned Anatolian peasant foot soldiers and the colorful costumes of the Janissary troops, was so vividly described in her ancient and mysterious language.

Janissaries were mostly Christian youths conscripted from occupied lands, eagerly or reluctantly sent to the sultan by impoverished families to improve their station in life, provided to the sultan as tribute, captured in battle or kidnapped. Martially trained, required to be celibate, earning exceptional privileges and prestige, they became the backbone of the Ottoman military might and comprised the elite imperial guard. Their valor, skill and loyalty to the sultan became legendary and eventually, like the Praetorian Guard in Imperial Rome, were a strong political force and often king-makers.

Unlike other European languages, Hungarian speakers flaunt its diphthongs, the slur of one vowel to end in another like the English ‘cow’ or ‘no.’ If French seems slightly delirious and somewhat pretentious, then Hungarian exceeds in sounding haughty and nasal when overheard ever so rarely in a crowd. Keeping their heads up in aristocratic Viennese company, Magyars, being the afterword in the hyphenated empire of Austria-Hungary, compensated boldly with the panache of an artiste among the club-footed, out-waltzing the residents of the waltz capital of the world and crowning an evening’s gala with a robust csarda, their national dance.

I always suspected that a Magyar had more Turk blood coursing through his veins than he would ever admit, much like a Brazilian with Yoruban blood or a native of New Orleans or Atlanta with a sanguinary taste of Senegal superbly “coloring” his personality. Not to mention the undeniable connection of eastern Europeans to their Jewish neighbors, sometimes tolerated but more often, like Peter denying Jesus thrice before the cock crowed, disclaimed with regard to any kinship yet immeasurably enriched by the association.

*1952, lyrics by Fran Landesman, music by Tommy J. Wolf Jr., recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, 1961, and Bette Midler, 1990.

Chapter 3: Life in East Lake View

Charlie calls for world peace, and Flako tells the truth

Back in East Lake View, some months after we had stopped the genocide of our brain cells, Steve Rowman came out of his house one hot summer evening with a tape recorder and a microphone. “I’monna walk around the ‘hood and get some interviews” he announced to me and our buddy Louie. All the characters we’ve got around here . . . ? Shit. Ask ‘em about the Truth, what that means to them, get ’em down on tape an’ see what they say. It’ll be a trip, man.”

Steve Rowman and his two younger brothers Bob and Jeff lived with their aging parents. They were really good rock ‘n roll musicians, appropriately eccentric, and had the first long hair in the neighborhood. They were both blessed and cursed by the eccentricities of their parents, especially of their mother. She was a nature freak, spent all her time outdoors and looked like a cross between Sacajawea and an aging Salomé. I would often run into her on her brisk daily walks to or from the lakefront. She was more often than not brushing the long graying black hair that hung down to the top of her backside. Perpetually tanned, she wore her dark red lipstick curved up at the corners beyond her natural lip line so that she looked like a Mediterranean Barbara Stanwyck. Her low voice spoke to everyone in a very familiar, almost conspiratorial way as she peppered her conversation with pointed and very personal questions without embarrassment. She’d talk the same way to her boys, telling Bobby, when he told her what he wanted for breakfast, that eggs without bacon was like a dick without balls.

One of the advantages of their parents’ quirky and permissive nature was that the boys could smoke dope in the kitchen and then amusedly watch Mrs. Rowman come in from her daily walk and fuss and fume as she hurried through the apartment lifting every window sash to wave out the remaining aromatic hemp smoke with exaggerated waves of her arms. I always felt bad, of course, like I was betraying her hospitality but it never once stopped me from smoking when it was offered by her boys.

The Rowman brothers, Steve, Bob and Jeff, were able to set their own course and pursue their music and other interests without any real obstacles to their rather ambitious plans. Sure, they faced constant nagging from their mom but they really could, unlike their friends, simply ignore it. They not only snubbed the conventions of the times but of our more immediate milieu and were non-conforming before it became de rigueur. The Rowmans were indulged by their parents and Bob’s displays of petulant self-absorption were a source of chagrin to his closer friends and especially to me. I often winced from the pierce of Bob’s rapier tongue. Steve suffered Bob at his worst by ignoring him so effectively that he made Bob look and feel uncool, as rare a phenomenon as Mississippi justice in a Negro trial. But the only guy that could make Bob eat shit, so to speak, was his younger brother Jeff.

As he had done more than once in the past, Bob claimed the largest portion of a piece of pie, the best looking hunk of steak on the dinner platter or the extra odd cookie by quickly spitting on his choice. “That’s mine,” he’d shamelessly proclaim with a smirk. Grinning and unchallenged, to the disgusted groans of his brothers, he’d savor the spoils of his little larceny. But his lack of culinary comity did not succeed for long. At dinner a few days later when Mrs. Rowman set a tray with slices of chocolate cake on the wooden table pressed against the wall beneath the dining room window Bob bent over his slab of choice, unarguably larger than the others, and spit on it, triumphantly declaring “mine.” Jeff, conceding nonchalantly, leaned over the same piece, spit a substantial glob of saliva on it and said, “You can have it.” He scooped up another slice and walked out of the room.

The Rowman boys had learned at an early age to disassociate themselves as best they could from their mother’s embarrassing and unexpectedly intrusive forays into their lives at school or on the street. Their discomfiture on the street, when they crossed her path, due to her unabashed demonstrations of eccentric Jewish motherhood was a humorous irony. To the kids in the neighborhood, even the Broadway Gang, they were the closest thing to the liberating phenomenon of the British Rock invasion. Simultaneously iconic and iconoclastic, they were virtually revered by the rest of us and deservedly so, we were convinced, confirmed by their complete lack of any arrogance or immodesty. They’d tease you and challenge you to match their sense of irony about the way things were and you felt that they really got a kick out of your response. Not only did all the girls in the neighborhood dig them, but all the guys into music paid a whole lot of attention to what they were doing.

They learned quickly enough how to separate the ass kissers from their real friends. But as cool as they were, they inevitably faced their equalizer on the street. The higher a monkey climbs the more it shows its ass is what their mother always said and they often ran into their mother on the street. She would yell something across to them like be sure to come home for supper or why didn’t you make the light out in your bedroom this morning. She might bring Bobby’s lunch to high school, interrupting class to personally hand it over to him or remark to the guys off-handedly, armed with statistics, that nine out of ten Puerto Ricans are looking for white women while Louie Luna, conspicuously Puerto Rican, suddenly busted out in laughter. Without batting an eye, she would tell a girl whom the boys had stopped to talk to that the girl was filling out well and her boobs were nicely showing now. On the street, her boys completely ignored her and acted as if she had mistaken their identity — as if, in fact, they had never seen her before.

Five-foot-one from her painted toenails to the top of her head, Mrs. Rowman was a dynamo. She set her sights on and took as her man, probably without much effective resistance on his part, Harry Rowman, the boys’ eventual father. He had played piano as a young man and had his own band when Benny Goodman was king. When I knew him he was already in his fifties. Short, with a strong chest, powerful arms, white hair and glasses, he worked as a union painter and minded his own business. At a time in my life when most adults were either the enemy, irrelevant or incomprehensible, Mr. Rowman was a joy to run into. He remembered my name and beamed with some kind of inner glow whenever I saw him and I always felt better after I did. Mr. Rowman was impervious, it seemed, to his wife’s nagging, did not simply tune her out but actually transcended her overbearing behavior, treating it as the petty annoyance that love could and should ignore. Beyond that, he appeared to have also transcended his modest circumstances, the unfulfilled dreams of fame and accomplishment which he must have had and developed some inner core of serenity. I felt that Mr. Rowman passed the acid test with me. Our paths crossed once when I was peaking on acid. I was walking down Broadway like it was the Enchanted Kingdom, moving past the other pedestrians as if they belonged to another dimension close to mine but just slightly out of phase, even their overheard conversations glancing off obliquely. In front of me, suddenly, I found a beaming Mr. Rowman. “Hellowww, Cho” (he pronounced the ‘J’ like a ‘Ch’). I shook his hand and told him I was glad to see him and meant it. “Well OK then, be good, Cho,” he said as he strode on purposefully. On acid, the seemingly insignificant can take on important and layered meanings. Mr. Rowman, with a bright aura, appeared so natural under these circumstances and not cartoon-like, not a part of the confused and incoherent mob. It confirmed to me that the man was graced with Right Mind in the Buddhist sense.

* * *

The Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha unfolded before me one lotus petal at a time. At least it appeared that way in the string of acid trips that I embarked upon and that seemed to connect, one to the other, in a continuity of enhanced experiences. One episode seemed to begin where the last one left off. At the time that I dropped my first dose of LSD, the Prudential Building was the tallest in Chicago. It soared to an 18-story height conspicuously planted on upper Michigan Avenue just south of the Chicago River. Two hundred and fifty micrograms was the probable dose that I ingested of lysergic acid diethylamide 25, the strongest drug known to man, i.e., requiring the smallest amount to effect a discernable change in consciousness.

Steve Rowman, Tim Mullins and I made our way downtown via taxi. By the time we reached Michigan Avenue and paid the fare, we virtually spilled out of the cab and onto the wide walk in front of the Prudential Building. It was after 10 PM, mostly deserted, and the overwhelming impression was of being in a concrete canyon. Not an uncommon analogy in an urban setting, but the vertiginous effect of the street and the resonance of its sheer vertical and geometrically expanding rise echoed in my jaw as the street vibrated like a string on a bass fiddle and at the lowest frequency possible for me to sense. Such a wide range between the troughs and valleys of this psychic sine wave that I could almost see it undulate through the avenue and feel its pressure in my chest cavity — STRRRRRRRRUNNNGGG — as it rang my teeth, my bones and the back of my skull. I finally understood that single-line poem by Guillaume Apollinaire, Et l’unique cordeau du trompette marine, “And the single string of the trumpets marine.”

He was a poet that I read in vain so as to hang onto a girl with whom I was madly and ridiculously in love. Ultimately, I was unsuccessful. She read and spoke French and was an artist. Dubiously educated and with no talent, I could never, of course, truly understand the significance of the move by the entire relevant art community, en masse, from Montmarte to Montparnasse in the Twenties, or the roots of the Cubists in the poetry of Apollinaire. I really was moved, however, by Apollinaire’s work although that may have been merely further evidence of my pathos as I struggled to retain her interest.

* * *

Like a lover
the morning sun
slowly rises and kisses you awake
your smile
soft and drowsy as you
let it play upon your face
O, how I dream
I might be like the morning sun
to you.

– Dori Caymmi

She came to me one night soon after I met her and when I had all but given up. We spent that evening in my apartment listening to Donovan and the Beatles. She and her friend came back to my place after work. We all worked together at a restaurant in Old Town, including my roommate Charlie, who was at home that evening. The evening stretched into the early morning hours and, too shy to make a move, I simply went to bed. The thrill of her coming into my room and lying down beside me has faded in time but not in memory. She was a year or two older than me with the thickest brown hair — waist length — large brown eyes and legs that wouldn’t quit. If I had only had more experience in lovemaking — I was a young eighteen – I could have made so much more of this opportunity, this serendipitous liaison with the great-great-granddaughter of Tecumseh.

As a Gemini, she perpetually sought her twin, she would tell me later, in earnest apparently, and I knew, even though we still made love, that I had already lost her. I yearned for her after we had parted and felt even lonelier when we were briefly together and she knew this and thus was never cruel. She would smile wistfully and present to me shyly, child-like, her newest art. Or, her imagination fired, read to me a poem by e.e. cummings or Apollinaire. I devoured everything I could get my hands on, vicariously making love to her through her chosen literature, and became enamored with the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hardy, Hugo and Flaubert. I became Alyosha, the most spiritual of the Brothers Karamazov, and pined away in my misery and in the noble suffering of love. Every woman I made love to for the next few years gained in the exchange. Obsessed with Marcia Montoya, I threw myself with all the passion for her into the women that followed. I suffered and this was not lost on those women. They were drawn by that suffering like a diabetic to sweets, like a lush to Manhattan, like a tongue to an ache.

My hapless roommate Charlie, the quintessential anti-hero of the late 1960s, remains etched in my memories. — Please forgive me, Charlie, whatever plane of existence or non you may be on, for this boorish betrayal of your memory as I condescend to contain and thereby diminish you with this self-serving attempt to define you for the sake of this story. I vow, the shade of Robert Service vigilant at my left shoulder, to avoid the mawkish and eschew any temptation to maudlin meandering through my memories. You must admit, however, that as tragic as your demise may have been, caught as well in the crosshairs of that wretched sniper, your short life evokes some semblance of the Theatre of the Absurd. – Charlie had shoulder-length hair as straw colored as a scarecrow in the August sun and so fine and blond at his receding forehead and top that it streaked up with its natural oils by the early evening, suggesting a stringy unkempt appearance despite his morning bath. Relaxed at home, he was, more often than not, content to sit cross-legged, his left arm wrapped tightly round his chest and hooked off his right shoulder ruminating ruefully of past glories — his own or maybe one of his literary heroes. With his other arm propped on a knee holding a cigarette close to the perpetual smirk on his side burned face, he was poised for yet another drag from the unfiltered Chesterfield that so stained his front teeth. His straw-broom hair brushing down the side of his face resolving into darker curly burns, his soft and perpetually watery eyes, filmy with a fine luster betraying a gentle and damaged if not altogether broken heart, and his upper lip puckered slightly like a rabbit’s revealing the stained teeth beneath, all fit some image I had of a 19th century British nobleman down on his luck and reduced to being a reluctant highwayman. At first meeting, he seemed gnome-like with a hunch in his shoulders as if he was trying to hunker down and be even less obtrusive. But as you got to know him, he grew in stature and you found in him an endearing and gentle quality as you smiled easily at some irony that he’d noted and that he wryly revealed to you. “Charlie Reynolds calls for World Peace,” he’d declare in counterpoint to the effete platitude trotted out every Christmas by the Pope. At five-foot-five inches high, head cocked slightly up and to the side, he’d look you right in the eye while his eyes momentarily flashed wide, like a shutter on a camera, and then he’d chuckle with a slightly quivering upper lip just before he took another drag on his cigarette from the corner of his mouth.

He did the most outlandish things in a thoroughly nonchalant manner like when in mixed company in our living room he’d suddenly remove all his clothes, sit cross-legged and hunched over on the floor and continue to smoke his cigarette in the most unassuming way. This is what we did in San Francisco, he’d say when the conversation abruptly stopped.

Charlie was strung out on jive – contributing to the filmy and distant look in his eyes — and managed to still function so well that I really didn’t know it until several months after we’d met. He would, when it struck his fancy, wistfully extol the virtues of the poppy. What’s wrong with feelin’ good if it don’t hurt no one, he’d say with such a glint in his eye you could navigate through the mists of Tintagel on the Cornish coast by its light.

Charlie was actually in San Francisco at Haight and Ashbury in 1968, the “Summer of Love.” He had dropped a dose of the most powerful hallucinogen that he had ever had the pleasure/misfortune to experience (it seemed to toggle back and forth). Psychically fried and barely able to maintain his balance as all reference points continually shifted, he lunged for support and wrapped himself around a San Francisco Herald coin-operated newspaper box. Draped across it like a seasick landlubber over the rail at sea, he saw the headline: STP KILLS! It was of course the very drug that he had recently dropped.

He survived to spend many evenings with Marcia and me drinking the jasmine tea that her mother had brought back from China. He would recite some verse by Robert Service, and Marcia seemed to really love it, smiling with child-like glee at one of Charlie’s more quixotic pronouncements.

Those evenings, imbued with a medieval charm, unfolded as I imagined they might have in the Plantagenet’s 12th Century Winter Palace at Chinon tinged only at the edges by the melancholy of Eleanor D’Aquitaine as they were by my own. The air was laced with the aroma of sandalwood incense and tea from China, the troubadour lyrics of Donavan completing the mood:

Guinevere of the Royal Court of Arthur
Draped in white velvet, silk and lace
The rustle of her gown on the marble staircase
Sparkles on fingers slender and pale
The jester he sleeps
As the raven he peeps
Through the dark, foreboding skies
O’er the royal domain
Indigo eyes in the flick’ring candlelight
Such is the silence
O’er royal Camelot.

Usually dressed in black and wearing Beatle Boots, Charlie had whiskers, like D’Artagnan, just under his lower lip filling in the cleft in the middle of his chin. He was a throwback romantic, embracing, yet somehow controlling, his addiction while struggling with his need to assimilate into traditional, and in his case highly romanticized, notions of love and family. Separated from mother at an early age, some sordid impulse impelling her to abandon husband and family, he and a sister were raised by his morose and embittered but, in the end, loyal father. Charlie, not unexpectedly, deteriorated as the years went by and eventually succumbed to that sniper of schizophrenia and left those who still cared about him a bizarre parting tale of improbable yet true circumstance.

On a whim and in an attempt to relive memories of his singular experiences in San Francisco, he made a trip back out there. Inevitably disappointed in his wistful attempt at recapturing some remnant of past glory or perhaps merely relevance, he resigned himself to the interminable bus ride back to Chicago. While in the middle of Iowa, he began to hear voices in his head urging him to get off the bus and seek out an address in the small town that they were approaching. He dutifully had the driver stop the bus and proceeded to walk to the house indicated in his head.

As he walked up to the front door of this house, he found it open and let himself in. Why and what he expected to find was never clear in the story related in the newspaper or when I spoke with Charlie’s sister about it later. He could not, by any stretch of the imagination, have possibly expected the young lion that bounded up from the rear of the house, knocked him down and pinned him to the ground. Why a lion in a house on the outskirts of a small town in Iowa?

Raised from a cub, the lion was domesticated and, in fact, did not hurt Charlie other than scare the pants off him. The owner called the local sheriff’s police and Charlie was arrested. By some coincidence, I read the story in the Chicago Tribune: ‘Chicago man arrested for illegal entry in Iowa house. Pinned to floor by lion.’ The story caught my eye and when I saw Charlie’s name, I was convinced that it must have been him. The rest of the story was filled in by Charlie’s sister in a later conversation.

He was released when they realized that he was harmless and he returned to his tiny apartment in Elgin outside of Chicago where on the next day he denied that arbitrary sniper further sport at his expense and hung himself.

So Steve brought out his tape recorder and hooked up with Louie Luna and together they gamely stepped off into the neighborhood looking for “the Truth.” Steve Cohn, our half-Irish, red-haired and red-faced buddy, soon joined them and sure got a taste of the truth from Mrs. Rowman when they ran into her.

She said to him: “I catch up with you and your luck is gonna run out.” “You? I never want to see in my house. You know what you are … a snake in the grass. That’s why you’re red. Now I see why your mother don’t want you. No mother throws a kid out. You know, as much as I don’t like him,” she said, pointing at Louie, “I like him better than you. And I told it to your face.”

This leaped off her lips in a slightly Yiddish accent as Louie and Steve exhorted her to “go on, tell the truth Mrs. Rowman/Ma.” Why she disliked Cohn was a mystery, although as later events would show, she might have had some intuition about people. Cohn did move out of town years later having had some financial difficulties as a commodities trader and leaving some petty but nonetheless telling and manipulative dealings in his wake. Some time later, she was convinced that Dean Barrera had tried to poison her by leaving some ground glass on her kitchen table and fumed uncharacteristically and insistently for several days about it. The boys dismissed this as just an example of her idiosyncrasy but with Dean later sinking into madness … who knows?

While Mrs. Rowman was still lashing away at Cohn with the Truth, the boys disengaged themselves and continued their interviews in the neighborhood and caught up with Flako, one of the head hombres in the Eagles. His brother Chuito would marry Ruthie, Harry’s younger sister and a very precocious, sharp-tongued and dark-eyed beauty who looked more like an Iphigenia than a Carmen thanks to her Greek father. So, in a way, we all became like family.

Flako was a user, a junkie, and was often seen walking in the ‘hood with a regal rhythm, his left shoulder leading and his left arm clutching his jacket lapel, stretching it across his upper chest just below his throat. He had been so high once that when he got home, he walked into his bedroom, pulled out his dresser drawer and pissed in it. When I heard the story from Flako’s brother Chuito, I assumed that he thought he was in the john. Flako, though, was not an object of amusement nor was he someone to be trifled with. Tall and skinny with big ears and bird-like features, he sported a porkpie hat and spoke like he stayed at 63rd and Loomis in the heart of the Black south side. I wasn’t sure why, but listening to him talk, the rhythm and the timing, the varied inflections moving from self-assured to almost plaintive and the uniquely Puerto Rican mix of Black- and Spanish-tinged dialect was nice to listen to — like a cross between a Carlos Santana and a Wes Montgomery solo.

“Man, when you high, nothin’ go wrong, cain’ go wrong. I like it. You in the lost jungle when you stop, man, in the jungle. Everythin’ so dark.

“One thing ‘bou me, man, I don’ have no weak mind. I wan’ do somethin’, I go ‘head do it.

“You? . . . you get you’sef a nickel bag and you can give it to all you friends. Me . . . I go get mysef a spoon. I find you, you know … you sick, you wanna get high. I say no . . . to a friend. You see somebody sick . . . man, a junkie ain’ got no friends.

“You got money, ev’body you friend, yeah, you know …Yeah.

“To me, tha’s the question . . . kickin’. Tha’s the reason I say to myself . . . why? why you doin’ it? I know I’m wrong. I see a friend mine, he say, Flako, dis an’ dis, why you doin’ it? Jus’ walk away from it.

“Think I could do it? Right . . . Right, I could do it.”

‘Faith,’ interjects Steve.

“I got faith in myself, shit.

“Hey, how you fillin’,” he asks a lady walking by. “Fine? Tha’s good. Ev’body fine today. Ev’body I see is fine.”

Chapter 4: Ruthie weeps in La Perla

Jeff Rowman’s piss hard-on woke him up and coerced him out of his sleepy comfort. He drank too much juice before he fell asleep and his distended bladder screamed out in agony forcing blood to the penis and consciousness to the brain or was it blood to the brain and . . . man, whatever. ‘I got to get to the john,’ was the only thing going through his mind as he slid from his bed and maneuvered through the nocturnal sentinels disguised as furniture in his room. By force of habit — sneaking in and out of his room at night — he soundlessly opened his bedroom door and crept like John Lennon’s nun to the kitchen, off which was located the only bathroom in the house. He made it through the hallway leading to the toilet, that repository of relief, the porcelain throne that, to him at the moment, rivaled in its appeal the Chrysanthemum Throne of Japan and entered the kitchen. His eyes now adjusted to the dim light, he saw a figure crouched low to the ground revealed by the moonlight streaming in through the window that framed the alley like a view from a cheap hotel, sleazy and slick with the blues in the night. He froze like a snapshot as a reflex of fear whipped his upper spine and lashed his neck in response. The intruder crouched even lower and moved like a four-legged crab, pincers extended parallel to the floor and head as retracted into the hunched shoulders as human form would allow. It sidled towards the back door still ajar from the uninvited entrée of this creeping crustacean in black dago-tee and grey chinos.

“Tiger, is that you? Whatayou doin’ man,” Jeff managed to blurt out as Tiger scuttled out the door through which he’d entered.

It turned out that Tiger had simply cased the Rowman apartment and chosen it for some easy pickin’s, not knowing who lived there. He and his buddies probably had as many laughs retelling the story as Jeff and his friends did. To witness Tiger’s rehash of the tale to his bro’s would have been precious. No doubt his description of the look on Jeff’s face was as funny as Jeff’s hilarious pantomime of Tiger crouched low to the ground — as though that would somehow prevent his being detected. In its sheer and extemporaneous but failed cunning, it reminded me of a story about Trooper, the president of the Aristocrats, another local gang.

Trooper was doing a stint at Cook County Jail and managed to escape by hanging underneath a delivery truck that had brought in supplies. Exhibiting the tandem of street smarts and turnip patch stupidity that it seems most habitual criminals are both blessed and cursed with, he immediately went back to his apartment at Webster and Clybourn. When the sheriff’s police inevitably showed up, he hid by hanging outside his third-floor bedroom like a chimp at the zoo, only the purchase of eight fingers on the horizontal plane of the sill separating him from a couple of nasty broken legs or worse. A deputy did, of course, glance out the window. I wonder, did he say “put your hands up” for a cheap laugh at Trooper’s expense as he pointed his service revolver at the top of his skull.

The lines between what was considered criminal and acceptable became quite blurred during those times. The proliferation of drug use had much to do with this. Everybody at the time felt that their intimacy with drugs was not, and could not, be considered criminal except by the arbitrary standards of the establishment. We’re not talking about heroin, you understand, but pot and acid. Now the fact that we also knew guys like Robo Ray, Arkansas, Flako and his brother Chuito was only incidental. The fact that those guys crossed the line and used the harder shit was due only to some sociological “glitch in the matrix.” Robo Ray was so strung out on cough syrup, which contained not only dextromethorphin but a righteous portion of codeine as well, that, rumor had it, he poured it over his pancakes in the morning. Not likely if you’ve ever spooned Robitussin to exorcise a hellish cough. But this little urban myth prevailed and Ray was thus beatified in both junkie and hippie lore.

Arkansas, on the other hand, should have known much better than to mainline crystal meth to the sore distress of his rapidly diminishing brain cells. He was Marcia’s man before I came along, and though I tried giving him the benefit of the doubt, I just couldn’t imagine any romance that was healthy between them or that compared to the feeling that I nursed like a wound for my Native American princess. She never spoke of him to me and I suspected that Arkansas eventually went back to Little Rock and perhaps spent his days on a bench in the park like some brilliant but permanently injured Forrest Gump talking ’bout his Jenny, Marcia that is, to anyone who would listen.

Flako’s brother Chuito was and remained an enigma to me. We called him the day tripper ’cause he always dropped his acid during the day. We’d see him walking in the park with his leather, a purple silk shirt, pork pie hat and dark shades, sporting a cane and a “Giaconda Smile.” The smile became a grin when he’d see someone he knew. He’d just stroll by with a little bop in his walk, neck arched a bit and leading with his chin. He avoided getting strung out on junk like his brother, but I knew he chipped, dabbled that is.

Several years later, after he and Ruthie had a couple of kids, they moved to Puerto Rico where he got a pretty good job with an oil company. Ruthie stuck by him like the good woman she was, despite his sordid sallies into the underbelly of San Juan’s Santurce and Levittown neighborhoods. To scratch that itch for H must have eventually become too compelling for him, or maybe it was just an ill-timed capitulation to that urge that led to his haphazard end. Either way, his body was found on a street corner in the squalor of the La Perla district of Old San Juan. It was treated by the cops as just another overdose although some of the circumstances seemed a bit awry. Another version of the story had him squeezing rat poison into a vein yearning for that sweet sticky stuff, payback for a vig too heavy to carry by the pusher man.

Making five hundred dollars a week, when that was some real money for a working man, with two young babies and Ruthie in his life, the chump burns out his veins as well as his life, slumped into a corner where the dogs piss and the winos vomit.

Irony and tragedy seemed to dog Harry’s family. Chuito and Flako were extensions of the family by marriage to his sister Ruthie. Ruthie was a dark-eyed dream, porcelain skin like a cameo in contrast to her wavy raven hair. Tough-skinned with a cutting edge to her humor, she was a sailor’s dream. I always regretted the fact that our difference in age at the time was great enough to discourage as awkward any relationship that just a few years later would have been perfectly fine. Long-legged, thin and athletic yet voluptuous in just the right places, to just the right proportion, and with lips that still thrill me when I recall her face. I remember the slightly mocking look she always gave me. You’re older but not a whole lot smarter is what she taunted me with. I knew she liked me, at least for a while. Louie told me that she once flicked a sly little smile at him, nodded towards me and licked her lips. There is simply no justice, I ruefully thought. I should have seized the opportunity and, gentleman be damned, made her mine and saved her from the heartaches that loomed in her future.

Not the least of those heartaches was the loss of her brother George to another wretched and arbitrary assassin, the AIDS virus. George also messed with H or jive as it was called then. He slowly began doing more and more until he eventually got strung out. We discouraged his use as well we could but did not have much moral high ground to stand on ourselves, although we had by then limited our indulgence to only weed. George was always into his own thing anyway, skirting along the edges of a few different scenes, some less wholesome than others. His use increased at the time that my friends and I stopped altogether and began attending the Temple of Kriya Yoga.

We took to yoga like falcons to the sky. We had the enthusiasm and devotion of converts and quickly gained the benefits of improved diet, meditation and pranayams — Kriya breathing techniques. George enjoyed this new culture and the new realm of interesting contacts while still keeping one foot in his opiate world. One evening at his brother Harry’s apartment where we had gathered to drink a little wine and watch “The Night of the Iguana” on TV, he drifted off to the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later he reappeared and sat cross-legged on the couch. After a short while he nodded out and stayed that way for another ten minutes. Suddenly he snapped up, shook his head, looked around with exaggerated awe and reverently remarked, “What a meditation!”

“Fuck you” everybody replied in unison as, unruffled, he plodded to the kitchen for a beer.

During his worst times he triangulated between Chicago, New York and the Rio Piedras neighborhood of San Juan. He’d wear out his welcome with his petty thefts and feeble cons pretty quickly, like asking my Mom to lend him some money or making off with my new down winter jacket, and then he’d be gone. He did the same with family in New York and Puerto Rico. He finally seemed to settle down a bit on the island and I lost touch with him except for the rare reference to him by his brother Harry. He got crazy in love with a prostitute and devoted himself to that romance, reported Harry. I didn’t know if he stopped using but suspected he continued to chip. When I heard that George was diagnosed with full blown AIDS, I was pissed off for a couple of seconds, figured him for such a loser and shrugged my shoulders in dismissal. When he died, I did much the same. It wasn’t till several years later that I felt any remorse, that I actually thought of George and the optimistic and uncompromising expectations that always seemed to be tugging at his sleeve. I remembered our shared youthful follies. How we just wanted to play great and soulful rock’n’roll, write music for the ladies to fall in love to and spread the word on peace and love with grit and a street edge, Chicago style.

The path of least resistance, however, beckoned to George at every turn in his life and he never failed to yield to its call. He spent no more than a couple of weeks in high school. He got a job at the stockyards and it paid pretty well for those times. His father, who among better but certainly not more memorable achievements, had shot dead his first wife after finding her in bed with another man, worked there as a butcher in between his failed restaurants and jobs as a chef. He only served a couple years in prison, given that it was a “crime of passion” and not premeditated. George and Harry’s father, the old-school Cypriot who would smack Harry in the back of the head without warning for standing in water with his new shoes while waiting for the bus, removed his clothes, neatly folded them on the beach by the Condado in San Juan, walked into the surf and drowned himself. He was, by this time, in his late seventies and might, arguably, have thought of this solution much earlier and saved everyone a lot of grief.

George cut and packaged meat at the stockyards and soon had a modestly lucrative little scam of pilfered steaks that he sold or traded for things like amplifiers, microphones and guitars. George played guitar and sang and he, Louie, Jeff and I were in a band together. I still attended Lane Tech High School but enjoyed, every once in a while, cutting classes to go up to George and Harry’s house while their mom was at work. We’d smoke some pot and chow down on the best aged steaks that you could get anywhere. George, his Greek blood coming to the fore, could really cook up a great strip of meat. The fact that it was free might have contributed a bit to the sizzle.

If it felt good, it was good, seemed to be George’s credo. He was a cherubic Adonis with dark eyes and wavy black hair. He looked a bit fleshy but that was due mostly to his large haunches and an ass that looked like a woman’s though not particularly sexy, mind you. He did OK with the ladies though his tastes ran a bit to the tart and slutty. Steaks were not the only thing he could deliver as he actually got a few of the guys laid, including me for the first time.

During one of the interminable winter evenings that we navigated through by smoking pot and hanging out in one hallway or another, George came up to us excitedly with an intriguing story about a blowjob he’d just gotten. “She’s this older chick and she lives right on Roscoe” he crowed. “You guys wanna go, just tell me. She’ll do you, too.” This went on for a few weeks and most of the guys, Steve, Cohn, Louie, Harry and even some other guys from the neighborhood like Mickey Mossadillo had those mysterious lips wrapped around their dicks.

Mickey was really short and when George brought him surreptitiously up the dark porch stairs and discreetly knocked on this sucking Samaritan’s back door, she told George, when she saw Mickey in the dim light, not to bring any kids by. Undaunted, Mickey said he’d show her just how much of a man he was. She conceded the point but did make him stand on the toilet as she bent to her business and polished his knob.

For one reason or another, and probably because I was more scared than titillated by the prospect of this adventure, I didn’t participate until a couple of months later. I accompanied George on a furtive, nocturnal mission to steam my stalk, following him up the stairs with, I had to admit, more a sense of dread than anticipation. George knocked softly and when a voice responded, he whispered, “It’s me.” I was relieved when the deep voice on the other side of the dark screen said not tonight and the door closed firmly. Did I mention that it was a deep voice? Hell, it was man deep! “What the fuck, George?!” I spit out when he got to the bottom of the stairs. “It’s a fucking man up there. Are you guys fucking nuts?” George, however, insisted that it was a woman and that he had seen undeniable proof of it, but I was not convinced. Suffice it to say that I was not going back there. Oh no, “not dith little black duck,” as Daffy would have said.

Chapter 5: The ‘Penthouse Revue’

Louie Luna and Ray Sandoval assimilated into the neighborhood gumbo so well that they moved through the different groups in the neighborhood as smooth as rum through a daiquiri. When asked where he was from, Ray would say he was a Cook County Puerto Rican, referring to Cook County Hospital where he was born, his mother on welfare. Ray might hang out with the Lake View High School frat kids in Alpha, with musicians in the neighborhood like Louie, the Rowman brothers or me, or just as easily with the guys in the Broadway Gang and sometimes even with the Latin Eagles. He had everyone’s respect, although some of it he had to earn with his fists. He never started a fight but he never, ever backed down from one, either. We hit it off right away, liked each other as soon as we met. Ray’s mom cooked mofongo, bacalao and chuletas with habichuelas rojas o negras while mine made similar type foods that poor people could afford to eat. Louie’s dad would grab his balls and front the TV with “I got your soft bathroom tissue right here” when some sponsor bullshit came across. while my father, not as demonstrative, would express the same thing verbally in Hungarian. My dad did, however, once kick in a television set because he was so pissed off by the news coverage of the war in Vietnam.

But it was the humor — sheer, inexplicable, side-splitting laughter — the kind that actually constricted the back of your neck to the crown of your skull with a paralyzing spasm that forged the bond between us. Floyd, the hillbilly neighbor who played some guitar, was immortalized in our pantheon of humor when we fictitiously cast him in a scene where he walks onto his front porch after a satisfying dinner. Stuffed to button-popping girth with a toothpick delicately pressed between thumb and forefinger, assiduously probing his gums while the other fingers are aristocratically fanned in the air, he burps and in a twangy drawl says, “Wone pick a feuuw?”, offering to play guitar with us. Our attention, of course, was fixed on his teeth.

We gleaned hours of laughs from re-casting the crew at the drug store diner in the Shoreham Hotel on Lake Shore Drive, around the corner from where I lived on Roscoe Street, as a rock ‘n roll band. Old Cy, the feeble, bald, misshapen, witty and kind Jewish owner, on lead guitar doing the splits as he bent those high notes on his Stratocaster, Lucille, the ancient, bird-nosed and skinny waitress, bringing up the bottom on her Fender with a solid walkin’ bass, and Willy, the black and bald (he really did look like Louie Armstrong, no lie) one-armed delivery man keeping furious time on the skins with double bass drums to make up for the missing arm, comprised this crazy hot band.

We laughed, maniacally sometimes, at situations in which we found ourselves because we took absolutely nothing about ourselves seriously and everything around us so seriously that embarrassment and heartbreak, like insatiable harpies, were always hovering at the threshold, poised to tear another piece of flesh from our fragile frames.

Louie was a troubled soul, but it was the type of trouble that genius is born of, that can create, through self-deprecation, the fertile ground for inspiration. Louie used humor as a buckler, a shield against a mace of prejudice. Irony in the guise of humor was his pungent sniff of the truth, slicing away like Occam’s razor at the nature of things, cutting to the simplest associations and triggering that epiphany in which one questions the most basic assumptions that a dominant white culture holds as self-evident. This was his chosen armor.

As outsiders, Louie, Ray and I understood the longings, heart throbs, if you will, of all Americans better than most natives. To us and to all our urban, immigrant and marginalized fellow travelers, less than true Americans according to the Nascar set, a person was first given an opportunity for inclusion, a chance to be part of the fabric of American culture, until proving themselves unworthy. We were sick of Southerners who had a proprietary sense of what it was to be a real American, who thought you were worthy solely by some fucked-up concept of birthright which was why, in the South, you could be a true Christian and a real American though you burned a cross on some uppity nigger’s lawn or burned down his church. You could disapprove of bombing a black church or murdering some young black man for whistling at a white woman, but to convict his murderer in a court of law would be a betrayal of your righteous white fellowship in Christ.

Yeah, American fundamentalist religion was tired, Louie and I insisted, so obvious, so self-serving and so fundamentally aspiritual that we were embarrassed for its adherents and denounced it as a tool of the devil — hallelujah, brothers ‘n’ sisters. We were absolutely convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if the Antichrist appeared, he’d be clothed in the trappings of an evangelist with a sermon of the Father of Lies spewing from his lying white lips.

What a strange mind, what a bizarre imagination Louie possessed. If he spilled salt, he would throw some over his left shoulder, not because he was superstitious but because if he didn’t, it would gnaw at him for the next half hour. He had an uncanny perception of and an ability to reveal the ironic and sometimes cruel aspects of his circumstances. He’d invent stories with elaborate, humiliating scenarios that would go something like this: Louie would walk into the lobby of a building where a girl he was interested in would be staying and run into her mother. She’d be sexy and provocative, and Louie, flustered and trying to be as cool and as unflappable as possible, would somehow trip as he entered the elevator, falling backwards as the doors closed. The elevator doors, their safety release failing, would catch his pant leg in their vise-like grip and pull him up feet first. Upended and bending to work his foot free, he’d complete his embarrassment with a resounding fart, the entire unfortunate scene witnessed, of course, by the mother of his new paramour. In Louie’s mind, this would be even more humiliating than if it had happened in front of the girl.

Or he’d be sitting in the living room of his new girl’s house on a satin sofa overlooking Lake Shore Drive and Belmont Harbor in the twilight. He’d be talking to his girl and her mother about his band and how the local precinct captain was going to sponsor them and set them up with some really cool gigs in the neighborhood which would inevitably lead to a recording contract. As he continued in this puffy manner and crossed one leg over the other to reveal the sole of his shoe, the mother would remark with a smirk, “Gee, that’s pretty cool, Louie, but why don’t you take the shit off your shoes first?” Utterly self-engaged, not realizing, of course, that he had stepped in some dog shit that was slowly permeating this elegant high-rise suite with its unmistakable aroma, Louie would be the fatuous chump, the foil in his own little drama.

Scatological humor, from the Greek skata or shit, invariably has a resonance with men, a natural audience. After a particularly nasty fart, your father might say, “Why don’t you wipe your ass and say you took a shit?” Women, of course, would roll their eyes, having given up on any presumption that the niceties they adhered to and that seemed to come naturally to them would mean a damn thing to this man-child and his eager offspring. I laughed out loud, for instance, thoroughly amused by the serendipitous humor in Becket’s Molloy. Molloy begins to complain of the three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours that “escape on the least pretext from his fundament,” only to realize that it’s nothing, “Not even one fart every four minutes. Why he hardly farts at all!” He quits the subject with a new respect for mathematics and its ability to help one know oneself.

As friends, there was a bit of the odd couple about me and Louie. He, seemingly self-assured, outspoken and candid, with no topic taboo and no question he would not ask of anyone, and I, reticent and reserved, self-conscious and sometimes introspective to the point of abstraction. We shared a keen curiosity, however, and as it turned out had a more similar sense of humor than either imagined at first. Louie became my musical mentor, teaching me the basics of the blues on the bass, while I became an invaluable source of information to him, particularly with respect to history. Louie’s curiosity was insatiable and I, as a result of my voracious reading, was able to provide at least a perspective to the subjects that perplexed him. Both Louie and Ray Sandoval found and exploited in me a receptive audience for their eccentric and self-deprecating humor.

After school, most days, we would meet at the apartment building that I lived in and where my father was the building superintendent. We would ride the elevator to the sixth floor, exit the hall into a painted gray enamel stairwell where I would unlock the padlock on a wooden panel door. It opened to more stairs leading up to the roof. My guests would climb the stairs to another door which opened on to the roof, exit and walk around to a final door that opened into the room housing the elevator motor and lift equipment. We called this room “the penthouse.” In the meantime, I closed the door behind them, locked the padlock so that my father couldn’t tell that anyone was up there, walked to the end of the corridor and exited the door onto the fire escape where I climbed the wrought iron ladder, stepped over the parapet onto the roof and joined my buddies in the penthouse.

Each of us typically rolled a couple of joints and smoked them leisurely as we engaged in some of the deepest and often goofiest conversations we’d ever have. The topics ranged from earnest discussions about Louie’s latest hero (he had a new one every few months – John Lennon, Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando, Andres Segovia, Paul Butterfield, Che, for example), East Indian philosophy (the Beatles were meditating with the Maharishi), the possible appeal of the Buddha and non-violence to a young, political and militant Puerto Rican, the prevalence of bigotry in America, the hostilities in Vietnam and where that might lead since American soldiers were still only advisors, and then on to pussy, music and almost always a lot of laughter.

A single bare bulb hanging by rubber-encased wires lit the room and had a thumb turn switch attached to the side of the holder. One of Louie’s front teeth was badly chipped and, when revealed, it turned his smile into a mischievous grin. The comic possibilities and variations offered by this chip and his naturally acerbic wit entertained us to no end. He was able, by running his index finger along it, to curl his upper lip in on itself and reveal his front teeth. This accomplished, there were, it seemed, an infinite number of looks, one more hilarious than the next, that he could wear on his mug. With a raised eyebrow and a sideways glance, he’d look like a rat impersonating Jack Benny. A come-hither look with bedroom eyes, a sincere or worried expression, a tough guy John Wayne glare with arched brows or an Elvis cock to his head with slightly raised shoulders all produced in us fits of laughter, especially when buzzed on weed. Every nuance and change in his features added some new comic dimension to the basic cartoon rat persona that the chip in his tooth so humorously evinced. Add to the mix Louie’s other characters sans chip, and one could certainly imagine, stoned and already in the mood to laugh, how one could be entertained for the better part of an hour by Louie turning off the light – it was pitch black in the penthouse when he did – and revealing, each time he turned the light back on, a different face.

I eventually figured out that it would have been virtually impossible, given that we frequented this penthouse for well over a year, that my father could not have been the wiser. Years later I arrived at the conclusion that he simply gave us a wide berth, choosing to overlook our use of the room. He would not have overlooked the pot, however, so he must not have suspected that we were smoking it.

One incident in particular, with respect to our pot smoking in the building, was pretty noteworthy. It was actually a year or so later and was one of the closest skirts with a drug bust that we ever experienced. Louie and I, too confident now in our run of the building, chose to smoke a joint in a room in the basement next to the building laundry room. As we were smoking and shooting the shit as usual, the door slowly opened and in peered a guy in khaki uniform, a soldier on leave. I directed him to the laundry and we went back to puffing. A minute or so later, I thought about it and suggested to Louie that we finish our smoke on the first-floor fire escape. We spent about ten minutes on the escape, finished our joints and walked down the long corridor together to the lobby. As we stepped down the few carpeted stairs that led to the lower level of the main lobby, we walked past a Chicago police officer who turned sideways and gave us a once-over. Another cop opened the lobby door for us, and we passed through the small foyer and out onto the street where we each literally turned side to side, quizzically looked at each other and then back at the four or five cops on the sidewalk in front and the three squad cars and two paddy wagons that were lined up, lights flashing, along the street. We mentally scratched our heads and nonchalantly walked up the street to Broadway and into the restaurant where we usually went for coffee and to continue our discussions. About an hour later, having exhausted our topic of the day, we walked back to my house where my father opened the apartment door and confronted us.

“Vere ver you?”

“At the Monterrey, like we always go.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, why?”

“The police ver here. Dere ver two guys smoking marivuana in the basement. They found evidence.”

“We don’t know nothin’ about it.”

“We had coffee up at the restaurant. You can check.”

My father dismissed us, but it seemed he wasn’t completely convinced. But then again, how the hell could we get past so many officers? I thanked my lucky stars ’cause both of us had almost a lid (a large sandwich bagful worth $25) of grass on us. It was for our own use and lasted for a couple of weeks, but we would certainly have been charged for possession to distribute, a much more serious offense than simple possession. Amazed at how our nonchalance and innocent manner had waltzed us right past the law, we also laughed at the over reaction in numbers by the cops. It was like trying to kill a hornet with a howitzer.

A year later, very close to my high school graduation, I did finally get busted by my father. Senior found a nickel bag of pot in my room and when confronted, figuring I might as well let all the shit hit the fan, I told him that I was quitting school as well. It was incredibly stupid, I realized later — the quitting, that is — and was due to my recent acid trips. I never regretted taking acid and felt overall that it helped put things into perspective for me, but this decision was not one of the better choices that resulted from the experience. My father, to his credit, did not explode but did a slow burn instead and told me to just sit there while he called the cops. I sat in the living room easy chair waiting for the cops to come and lock me up.

When they arrived, he intercepted them in the hall outside the door to the apartment and after a couple of minutes entered with two officers. They were both young guys, and one of them looked down at me and asked authoritatively where I got the pot. I lied and told him it was from some long-hair on Wells Street in Old Town. The young cop then asked, earnestly it seemed to me, did I know that the influx of pot and the distribution to young guys like me was a communist plot by the Red Chinese to subvert the youth of America and make our country more vulnerable as a result? I did not respond, just shrugged my shoulders a bit. The officers and my father went back out in the hall for a short time, and when they came back, the cop made me an offer: stay in school and we don’t bust you. I thought about it for almost 30 seconds and agreed to the terms. I was amazed afterwards at my own chutzpah, given the circumstances.

Among the many absurdities that graced those blithe interludes in the penthouse, respites from the meaner aspects of my quiet teenage desperation, the most embarrassing thing occurred one afternoon. Acquaintances that had never experienced the nuanced diversions of the penthouse experience were invited up for a smoke. The mad piano student from Nebraska and, unbeknownst to us, closeted gay betrayer, attended one of our soirees in the elevator room salon. This other sniper in our midst, who a few months later would perform so contempibly in the denouement of Dean Barrera’s mental health, ascended one afternoon to the penthouse with an intriguing new friend of his. Raven-haired, in her early twenties, she looked like Mata Hari in bell bottoms — very sophisticated, it seemed to me.

The usual routine at the “Penthouse Revue” began, and after a couple of joints were passed around, I found myself sitting next to this femme noir. I had a proclivity to chest colds and respiratory infections and coughed uncontrollably when the pot was particularly harsh. On one of the passes of a joint, I made the mistake of taking a deeper toke than I should have and triggered one of those irresistible coughs that began as an almost pleasant tickle in the depth of my lungs and grew relentlessly to a violent spasm. I coughed so ferociously that air shot through all of my sinus passages, forcing a huge snot to dismount gymnastically from my nostril and land, with a perfect 10 for style and degree of difficulty, on the back of my hand. The hand was palm down on my leg just above the knee and about two feet away from the face of the lady whose gaze and attention just happened to be fixed on the exact spot where the snot stuck its perfect landing. It vibrated briefly and then glistened proudly as it caught the light from the naked bulb overhead. Neither I nor the lady moved or breathed for several moments, an interminable agony of frozen time. I finally removed my hand and wiped it off and neither she nor I acknowledged that it ever happened.

Sometimes the damndest thing, like some small and unexpected intimacy, can break the ice and open an avenue to a new relationship. Suffice it to say that this did not in fact occur and I never saw her again.

It’s important to note that this, let’s just say, eccentric pianist from Omaha who had made me uneasy with his prolonged, inscrutable and much too direct stares was, at the time, shrugged off by us as merely a sort of weird artist. We were probably as tolerant as any heteros you’d find anywhere. The numerous gay personalities one would find in the largest homosexual neighborhood in the Midwest were simply another source of humor to us, particularly the more sibilant and theatrical types; nothing really mean spirited at all. We had learned some humility, as a matter of fact, a cold water dousing, if you will, of our hard-on driven impudence when, walking through the park one afternoon, our attention was engaged by some gorgeous women gesticulating provocatively to us from a distance. They were gorgeous, voluptuous … you’d think that we might have got a clue that something was amiss, that it didn’t add up. Like some really seductive and beautiful women would beckon to us in the afternoon, or at any time for that matter. When we got closer and finally figured out that they were really guys in drag having a gay old time at our expense, Louie, Ray, Steve and I just waved them off and laughed sheepishly as we quickly about-faced and headed back to the neighborhood. But Nebraska was different because we didn’t know, and because we were convinced that he betrayed and damaged Dean. It was life in the big city — we knew that — but it still wasn’t right.

The entire issue is so tired and tedious. You’re either gay or you’re not. On the other hand, you can be in some strange netherworld, evidently, where you are and you aren’t, where if it feels good it’s alright. I mean you’re not really gay but you could fuck a guy in the ass and still be a macho motherfucker like the scumbag tough guys in prison. Yeah sure, they say that it’s not really about sex, it’s about power, but what the fuck, you still have to stick your hard dick into some guys poop chute. The fact that your dick is hard is not inconsequential, by the way. Guess what … it turned your ass on, didn’t it? No matter how you play it off, how you pimp and preen and strut around like the cock o’ the walk, some dude’s hairy asshole gave you a hard-on. I always chuckle at the thought.

If your sexual orientation is determined and irreversible by the time you’re six years old, why doesn’t everyone just accept it. That way everybody knows the score and you save a lot of heartaches, hysterics and hand-wringing, not to mention the awkward trauma of belated discovery. Too simple, I suppose. Not enough drama.

Chapter 6: The Magnus effect

East Lakeview really was a spicy soup, a real gumbo stocked with people from all over the world and of all persuasions. Working class natives filled in the background of this crazy canvas. They would, if they were lucky enough to hang on to their homes, eventually cash out big time when they sold them for 20 times more than what they bought them for. Thousands of gay guys who eventually shifted “Boys Town” from Clark and Diversey to Roscoe and Halsted peppered the streets and truly lived in a parallel world, Xanadu in the midst of Babylon. Crewcut jocks and longhaired hippies, bikers and militant yippies, stewardesses and secretaries from Davenport or Fort Wayne or Escanaba or Wausau who rented two bedroom apartments with roommates — or studios if they were newly arrived — streamed past each other on Broadway and the side streets leading to Lake Michigan. Moriama, the squat, thick-necked Japanese tough with tinted glasses as thick as the bottom of a coke bottle, always dressed like an auto mechanic and worked the streets with his “boys,” as he called them. He was into stealing shit, but I never really knew what and never actually saw his boys, nor did anybody else that I knew. He could and would kick your ass, though, and nobody fucked with him.

Speaking of Japanese characters, Ono certainly qualified as local color. You could run into her carrying a huge white rabbit, stroking it as she hastily navigated her way down Broadway, her long black hair swaying across her thick flat butt as, slightly pigeon-toed, she pumped her chubby legs in earnest and swung her hips in a staccato rhythm. She was always friendly when she met you and would turn sideways to talk to you as she continued to walk. She’d speak uninhibitedly as if she’d known you for a long time, and you’d be drawn to follow her for a half block or so, nodding your head to acknowledge the communication, yet when she continued briskly on her way, you were left in her wake, and damn if you knew what you had just been talking about.

I spent much of my time after school rehearsing with our rock ‘n roll band in the basement of the apartment building where we lived. My father let us use a storage room filled with old furniture and mattresses left over from when the building had offered the option of furnished apartments. These items helped absorb the sound, and we made use of the opportunity on a daily basis. I played the bass and jumped from obscurity to respectful consideration in the neighborhood when word spread that I was able to double-pick the bass lines to “Hey Joe” (watcha doin’ with that gun in your hand?) just like in the original version by The Leaves. It came out a couple years before Jimi Hendrix covered it on his legendary Are You Experienced? album.

One of the most eccentric characters in the local music scene was Billy Marvalle and for a number of reasons. His odd sense of humor actually surpassed Louie Luna’s. With a gummy and rare smile and a look that hovered between scorn and mischievous humor, he was consummately unpredictable. Much of it was contrived, I suspected, but if it was cultivated by him to keep you off balance and guessing, then he was successful. If you asked him how he felt, he might say he felt like milk or like dirty wax. I figured he was referring to the common patches of wax left crushed onto the sidewalk from the penny candy wax tubes filled with different colored syrupy sweet liquid that was sold at candy counters at the time. The odd thing was that you almost knew what he meant. He’d catch you off guard. He once related to me, very matter-of-factly, an encounter with a guy on the street as he was walking home at night. This guy had stopped him to brag about the fact that he had just stuck half a load of Wonder Bread up his ass. What to make of that? We both shrugged our shoulders.

Billy once walked six blocks from his house on Warner Street to his rehearsal place wearing nothing but his waist length navy peacoat buttoned to the neck and carrying his guitar case. Another time, you might have caught him walking with his case inside of which was nothing but a bottle of Wild Turkey. He didn’t drink whiskey. Some asshole once stopped him and asked him if he was a hillbilly. Yeah, that’s right, he answered, though he wasn’t from the South. The guy punched him in the mouth and split his lip.

Marvalle anticipated musical trends with an uncanny sense, although he was not particularly talented. He never really played guitar that well, nor was his voice that good, but he worked awfully hard at it. He was possibly the most ambitious and driven musician in the area and was absolutely convinced that he and his band were going to be as big as The Beatles one day. He played an alternative sort of rock ‘n roll with the three Rowman brothers, a precursor to Punk and New Wave, and he did so at least a couple of years before the Ramones. I thought of him as a bit of an idiot/savant, not a real one, of course, but in the sense that he had no formal education past grade school yet was impeccably informed about the music scene and later cinema.

I went with Billy to see a highly praised film by the film maker’s film maker, Robert Bresson. This film received four stars from every critic, including Siskel and Ebert.

A Parisian delivery man is erroneously accused of a petty theft and, through a series of misfortunes and coincidences, ends up in prison. Through what one can only assume to have been thought as brilliant camera work by the critics, the fact that he is in prison is hammered home to the audience by weird camera angles and extended and excruciatingly slow zoom-ins of the massive locks on the iron bars. Added to this effect, as if one has not understood the irony, is an ominous and echoing click. It seemed an attempt to imply finality, inevitability, some sense of existential alienation — your guess is as good as mine. The guy gets out of prison a little while later, however, and one is expected to buy the notion that he becomes an axe murderer as a result of some moral entropy that occurs from his Camus-like disintegration. After the movie is over and Marvalle and I stand up as the credits are rolling, he indignantly yells out: “This is shit!” There is, perhaps significantly, no argument or comment by the other viewers as they make a hushed exit from the theater in a substantially wo