Painted Cities (3 page)

When we got to the front of the building and turned to look in the direction of the flames, we saw that it wasn’t our building that was on fire, but the building behind. And with faces of relief, and glassy eyes, each family from May Street’s row of apartment buildings stood looking at the flames shooting up.

Betty our landlady was already out there, hard at work, sweeping the cascading soot into the gutter, the soot that kept falling over the places she had just swept. And Joe was out there as well, undoubtedly thinking up some way to snag one of the pump keys the firemen were using. I remember when word was passed that it had been Lil’ China who had set the blaze. That he had done so in a jealous attempt to get back at his ex-wife for seeing another man. I remember also the gasps that sounded from everyone but Betty, who was too busy sweeping her sidewalk, when it was further discovered that Cookie, China’s ex-wife, and their three kids had not been able to escape the fire. It was in this instance especially, this milling around of all the neighbors, the good-looking women revealed in their curlers and eyebrowless faces, the kids in their Loony Tunes pajamas, the fathers, like mine, in their shorts, shirtless, bare, that I remember hearing all the phrases that made up my youth, and surely Delia’s too. “Who was it?” “Did they catch him?” “Did she die?” “Damn, the kids too?” All these phrases delivered with honest concern, with heartfelt sincerity. In the eyes of all those neighbors, looking up, you could see the flames, and you could also see that just like Delia and I thought about fortunes while we panned for gold, our neighbors
were thinking about Cookie, her kids, and even China, who was now, it was reported, in custody. They could see flames rushing through their own apartments, engulfing their own families, and they could see perfectly how the cops had beat China once he was caught, “because any father who kills his kids would definitely get his ass beat by the cops.” And somehow, though China’s deed was inherently wrong, it was obvious that everyone there could fathom it completely. In light of China, the death of Cookie, in light of all those other deaths—Smokey who had been gunned down across the street one September night, or any of those others on the receiving ends of bullets or suspicious fires, or even those who had succumbed to natural deaths, to old age or heart attacks—in light of all this, the families could band together, the neighbors could all come together and say “Damn, the kids too?” and shake their heads with some common understanding, some relief in the thought that they had dodged yet another bullet, then say good night to each other in common courtesy, and retreat back to their apartments, like nothing could be done, like life was simply an arrangement, the cards had been dealt and you had to play.

Eventually, after the fire was quelled, and the firemen had given the all clear, my family climbed back up our stairs. By that time the sun was coming up, and my father asked us if we all wanted to go out onto the back porch, which faced east, toward a Lake Michigan masked by skyscrapers, toward a sunrise that would bring the usual heat wave, and toward the charred buildings that had been affected by the blaze. We stood out there, Delia, my parents, my uncle, and I, looking at the burnt remains, inhaling the deep smell of seared wood, basking in whatever coolness the early morning offered. We
looked at the wet streets, the buildings dripping with black, sooty water, and I suppose we were searching for something. As the sun came up, and the morning mist began to burn off, I looked down the long rows of porches that stretched off into infinity on either side of us, and saw each family, arms entwined, looking toward the sunrise and doing the same.

PAINTED CITIES

HANGING GARDENS

R
om has his colors down like no one else in the hood. Turned the west face of Speedy’s corner store into a three-dimensional dreamscape, complete with galaxies, shooting stars, and black holes that appear to bore right through the brick wall they’re sprayed on. How he gets his colors to catch light like that, especially at night, when the orange of the streetlamps reflects off his murals in iridescent gleams, is a mystery to everyone. Awestruck, they watch him perform, red bandanna maroon with sweat, clothes and skin speckled with over-spray: baby blue, crimson red, hi-glo yellow.

Speedy had seen the job Rom did on the alley wall of Saint Stephen’s rectory. The Christ on the cross mural: overpowering not because of the crown of thorns, the blood-dripping wounds, or the long, pouting stare Catholics are accustomed to, but because of the
way Christ looms above, as if frescoed on the concave surface of a spoon. Around Christ galaxies spin, shooting stars streak, and his white gown flows in a cosmic wind. To this day the mural is a routine stop on the North Side’s bus tours into the heart of the city.

Most of Rom’s pieces are commissioned by area businesses or churches—maybe even the public, if Rom takes to heart the suggestions he hears while working. “Hey, bro, how about dedicating to my girlfriend, Flaca?” “How about to my mother?” “My grandmother who died yesterday?” But his dedication to Arelia Rosas, a ten-year-old girl who disappeared the summer before last, simply appeared one morning without warning on the octagonal brick kiosk that sits before the old Lutheran church on Nineteenth and Peoria.

The neighbors called the mural “poignant,” though many were unsure of what the word meant. It wasn’t negative, though, most were sure of that, so they used the word over and over to describe the dedication until months later, when the word dropped from favor through sheer overuse.

In the mural, a caricature of Arelia sits alone on the wood bench her grandfather made for her many years before and placed in front of the ground-floor apartment he lived in. How Rom knew this intimate detail of the Rosas family, no one knows, but they chalk it up to an artist’s intuition. Anyone passing the scene sees the bench, the brick-molded asphalt siding of her grandfather’s building, and knows immediately the moment takes place in summer, that there is an open fire hydrant somewhere nearby and that the scents of the
neighborhood—frying tacos, boiling pots of garlic-spiced
frijoles
, cool Lake Michigan breezes transported by miles of sewer pipe—layer the atmosphere.

She sits playing with her hair. Everyone remarks how Arelia could just sit for hours, contented, smiling to herself occasionally when something funny came to mind. “But she never cried,” her mother says. “No, never.” Yet in the dedication, as contented as Arelia seems, chrome tears run down her high cheeks. This is where poignancy takes place.

Within the basket of each tear a city appears, like a hanging garden. Upon close inspection the image is revealed as a portrait of the neighborhood itself, shot from above, minute down to steeples and the path of the L as it snakes down Twenty-First Street. How he got his spray down to such fine points no one will ever know, and this is an issue of contention among the local graffiti artists: whether or not Rom actually broke the rules and employed brush. But the haze is there, the over-spray, the telltale sign of aerosol art, which, in this case, enhances the already translucent tears, the cities held within glass bulbs like holiday paperweights filled with liquid, begging to be flipped and allowed to snow.

The tears don’t stop at the cheeks. They continue to fall: two are in midair. Eventually, one glances off Arelia’s white knee and multiplies in a flash, producing more tears, finer tears, smaller cities. The silver droplets reach the image’s painted cement sidewalk and sink into what now appears to be a vast city in and of itself, splayed out beneath the reflective sheen of Arelia’s black patent-leather shoes. Corridors of streetlights, side streets, meet at infinite points around the kiosk. At times, the neighbors say, the painted cities come alive,
movement can be seen, the L’s slithering like hobby railroads. The neighborhood’s lowriders stop and go on the boulevards.

Rom takes no credit for his murals. Never signs them, unless somewhere in the jumble of letters at the bottom of his pieces the name
ROM
is encoded. The neighbors call this humility, though many are unsure of what the word means. They use it anyway, while they wait for miracles.

RESIDUE

C
ould’ve been Death himself, the grim reaper, descending into the basketball court that night. Could’ve been ready to pull out any number of weapons, automatics, pumps, side-by-sides—everyone knows the grim reaper don’t use sickles no more.

Grim reaper
looked
like he grew up South Side, way he pimped down the alley ramp into Barrett Park. Even though ol’ boy was walking slow, that slight bump in his step was all South Side, Twenty-Second and Damen to be exact. Could name the street corner by that walk alone.

First thought was he’d been living in somebody’s basement. Jose Morales, valedictorian at Juarez High School, thought it, and Sleepy too, twelve-year-old, droopy eyed Party Boy in training. Everyone in the park that night thought it. That, and how the world got awful small sometimes. Like just last week, when Beany from the Two-Ones found out his old lady was fucking some dude where she worked downtown. Xerox repairman wound up being Juice from the Party People over on Allport, Beany’s best friend when they
came up together on Eighteenth. Two days later Juice was found tied to an alley lamppost, alive but beaten. Beany’s out hunting for his old lady now; he’s got something more serious in mind for her.

Jr. Chine stood at the far end of the basketball court watching the scene develop. He wasn’t afraid of anything he could see, at least that’s what he liked to tell himself. He’d heard Juice’s story, how Beany was now after his girlfriend. “Motherfuckers should’ve seen it coming,” he’d told Joker, his Party Boy brother, his best friend in the neighborhood. “You look for trouble, shit’s going to find you first.” Joker’s only response had been to laugh. Joker was a thief, of everything.

But it figured the grim reaper was living in the neighborhood. Probably renting out a musty concrete basement for a buck fifty a month, utilities included, stolen from a next-door neighbor. Might have assumed the name Julio Ramirez, or Juan Calderon, one of those generic Mexican names nobody’d suspect it was Death himself, coming in at strange hours. Whoever owned the building, the landlord living in the front, highest apartment, like they always do, probably thought Death was just a good worker. Probably thought he was some
mojado
busting his ass making calculators in Elgin for fourteen hours a day, wiring cash back home to Mexico, supporting seven growing children and a wife named Iris, or Esmeralda, some name that brought to mind young beauty, though she herself was tired and worn. Landlord probably thought to hire Death too, being he was such a good worker. Give him twenty bucks to patch the front sidewalk, holes so big kids be falling down there, assumed kidnapped until someone heard the screaming.

And all along it was the grim reaper, filling in holes, living in the neighborhood, existing incognito.

Jr. Chine said it first, to no one in particular: “Hey, bro, that’s Joker.” Exactly how he knew the grim reaper was really Joker was impossible to tell, but they were good friends, and good friends can generally sense one another, like when you know a hit’s pulling down the street five minutes before you actually see the car, cab darker than the street itself, orange street light thick as humidity.

It had been Jr. Chine’s shot. He’d had the ball on the low post, about to release his patented baseline jumper, dramatic for its disregard of the backboard, its confidence as it cycled through the air and then swooped the chain-mesh net. The ball dropped from his hands like a whistle’d been blown. It trotted toward the field house, down the slope of the compressed basketball court, each bounce accompanied by the twang of an overinflated ball, into the slot between the cyclone retaining fence and the back of the brick building, where ball players, drunks, and wicky-stick fiends pissed, the piss collecting over generations, reeking, giving the field house its neighborhood moniker, “Stinky.”

The figure’s hands were hidden in his sweatshirt pockets. The deep hood hung low over his brow and his arms were locked at the elbows. The material was being stretched down as if the figure were cupping his balls, making the body seem even more ominous, an open mouth screaming, melting. If the crowd on the court could’ve seen the hands, a positive identification could’ve been made. They would’ve known for sure it was Death: long, white fingers, black fingernails. Or they would’ve known it was really Joker: bleeding crucifix tattoo on the web of his right hand, P
ARTY
B
OYS
etched in Old English script like a banner over the crucifix. Jr. Chine approached the descending figure cautiously, his own right hand
gripping the .25 automatic stuffed in the pocket of his cutoff jeans. He flipped the safety off, though, like always, he questioned immediately whether he’d actually flipped it on, and was now about to die feeling stupid. If he lived, he vowed, he’d memorize which action was the correct one, get the safety situation down pat, like he had the clip-loading maneuvers down pat, practicing for hours as he lay in bed, popping the clip in and out, in the dark, sightless, the clicks of the release mechanism like second nature. He sidestepped toward the figure. His steps shortened as he neared. And suddenly Jr. Chine’s vision went third-person. Everything—the game, those standing behind, the cigarette Jr. Chine had left smoldering until he was back downcourt—disappeared from view, and he could see it all as if he was living his own movie.