For My Grandchildren

A Simpler Time, Race Street, Chicago 1951

We lived in a two-room flat that cost fifteen dollars a month.  The floors sagged from the weight of a wine press and wine barrels that were once stored there.  Water rushed diagonally, then dammed up against the room’s west wall when my mother scrubbed the linoleum floor. Not even Lysol could remove the perfume of fermented grapes that filled the air.

After work each day, my father went to a bath house on Grand Avenue while we bathed in a twenty-five-gallon tub filled with pots of cold water heated on the oil stove. We kept our food in a fruit crate from A & P. He hammered it outside the window, just out of reach of the alley cats and sewer rats.  We lived on Race Street for fourteen months where I slept in a crib opposite a glass-dividing door, and where just beyond another family lived its life in silhouettes with clear voices. Sweetness filled the rooms, and we were drunk with happiness.

A Childhood Recipe, Elizabeth Street

It hit us like a freight train the moment we opened the door leading up to our apartment – this mouth-watering aroma of hot Italian sausages and garlic cloves frying in olive oil. The entire building simmered in it.

Like a sculptress, my mother kneaded ground beef and mixed grated Parmesan cheese, saltine crackers, eggs, and pepper into meatballs, the size of small plums. She labored all afternoon over fresh pasta, flattened and rolled it into ravioli, filled it with ricotta and fresh parsley, then cut it into small squares with a wheel cutter. Her fingers left ribbons of dough all over the table.

We kept our Sundays for an Italian spread cooked in an eight-quart aluminum pot teeming with crushed tomatoes, Contadina paste, meatballs and beef neck bones – Calabrese style. We dipped warm bread bought from Atlas Bakery into her red “gravy,” the long wooden spoon strewed delicious steam into every room.

The Day After Vito's Tavern

He was a left-handed Tarzan swinging from Andante’s grocery store awning. His right hand waved a .22 caliber pistol, and shots rang out on Elizabeth and Race Street, Father’s Day, 1957. The Everly Brothers were singing Bye, Bye Love on the Philco; Rocky Marciano abandoned his title the year before, and this was just another Sunday brawl between my mom and dad.

Every Saturday night my mom and dad would go to Vito’s Tavern and come home drunk. Every Sunday brought no surprises for my sister and me, but this time mom broke my Gene Autry guitar over his head, heavy with 80-proof, and we had to duck through alleys and down gangways to avoid his Fairlane’s squealing tires.

Why was he chasing us? How was I to know about the effects of Early Times Kentucky whiskey and Blatz beer at six-years-old? He tried to leave my mother before, and he made my sister lug suitcases down the front stairs while I listened to cursing and the neighbors rustling, their doors slightly ajar.  We cried because of his almost leave-taking. He said, “…not even a box of White Owl cigars… and …let’s go to the White Sox game.”  

But he passed out just in time, and my sister dragged his suitcases up the stairs until next time.  My mother didn’t speak to him for four days, and he made me his mediator with a mission to obtain her mercy. By Saturday, the two of them were going to Vito’s Tavern once again, and I’m All Shook Up was playing on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

Five Years before Pete Rose

I used to buy a box of baseball cards at Tessie’s candy store on Elizabeth Street and Ohio for two dollars, forty packs frosted in glucose and a yield of two-hundred players we’d swap like big-league managers making trades.  Sometimes two or three Ernie Banks’ cards turned up in one box, bait for any Cubs addict in 1958. 

I was the only White Sox fan on Elizabeth Street that year, a pariah who went to Wrigley Field carrying a bag of peanut butter sandwiches for munching, baseball cards for autographs, and gum for wagering with my enemies on the game’s outcome. We’d always arrive just in time for batting practice; I’d cheer for the challenger in town—Reds, Dodgers, Phillies, it didn’t matter—amid jeers. I’d bet forty sticks of gum against the Cubs each game and come home overdosed on sugar, my jaws sore from chewing.

Elizabeth Street

My friends and I used sewer covers for bases and crushed wax cups for baseballs; it was a place peopled with names like Aiellinello, Petrelli, Pascucciello, and Brown.  On hot summer days, the fire hydrant surged high fliers made with tires and two-by-fours.  I swam along street curbs filled from backed-up sewers until the police came with their monkey wrenches.

It was a time and place for Italian feasts and a marching, oom-pah band on Sunday mornings and Santa Maria Addolorata’s procession of religious icons that I was lifted to kiss for just one dollar. It was a time and place where we pitched pennies until dusk under a canopy at Andante’s grocery store to escape the widening June sun already burning away thoughts of school, and the old man yelling, Bunch of potatoes, on a horse-driven wagon filled with vegetables in front of Rosa’s candy store where we bought black licorice sticks, Kayo, and a candy bar for just fifteen cents. All of this made way for a gentrifide street filled with condominiums years later.

1959

I wish I could have lived someone else’s life, maybe go back to Chicago and ride the Ravenswood ‘L’ through landscapes of dis-integrated streets with John Dickson, or live in New York and watch Dorothy Blake draw another long line of phlegm and ooze it into the open bottle on her desk next to Len Roberts’. Maybe I could sing along in silence while riding to Smithville Methodist church with Stephen Dunn from New Jersey; perhaps pump the vibrato’s thin blade and stir the molecules of sound with Michael Collier in Phoenix, Arizona, or live in Williamsport, Pa and play a game of sandlot baseball in an empty lot, ringed by elms and fir and honeysuckle, with Gregory Djanikian.

But my story needs to be written about playing ring-a-levio in gangways in my old neighborhood, where rats were the only scare lurking in the dark corners of tenement buildings where we played on past nine o’clock while lovers embraced in dark passageways outside doors that remained unlocked throughout the night.

It was the first time in forty years since the White Sox were in the World Series, and for seven days, Chicago forgot that America was at the helm of the world with Dwight D. Eisenhower, that rock ‘n’ roll was just four years old, and Chryslers and Cadillacs sported wings for tail lights.

It was a time when young girls roller skated on the streets while we played fast pitch until dusk against a humming factory wall, and little boys in Davy Crockett hats pitched pennies on treeless streets under six thousand, city stars without ozone, kidnapping, or terrorists’ alerts.

It was a place where teen-age gals in poodle skirts, bobby socks and Angora sweaters danced with guys in Brylcreem-slicked hair that snapped their fingers to I Only Have Eyes for You, while doo-whopping around push-button Dodges with fuzzy dice and Bobby loves Pidge air brushed on both sides.  

For one week we didn’t care about Gidget and Little Joe, and two monkeys hurling through space over Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, and the rest of the forty-five states where Dinah Shore launched good-night kisses to us all beneath the mid-September, Soviet moon.   

"Where's my dish towel?"

We’re playing under a blinking street lamp and a few luminous city stars. First base is a sewer cover where Race Street line-drives into Elizabeth. Second base is Michael Petrelli’s Dago-tee. Third base is my dad’s plumbing rag, and home plate is my mom’s dish towel.

The ball is a crushed waxed papered cup filled with pieces of rubber, and the bat is the handle of a whisk brush broom. Pitcher’s hands are out. There are no foul lines, except for street curbs, and anything that hits Andante’s grocery store awning is a homer. In my mind, I’m playing in Comiskey Park at 35^th & Shields against the Yankees. My cleats are high-top Converse sneakers with Little Louie’s number 11 Sharpied on the rubber toe caps.

The game is tied, and my mom is broadcasting “Get your ass home” signals through the window blinds. But I’m in a pickle: there are two outs, and Jo-Jo Lucenti is on third.  I know I’ll never launch one, even though I point just like the Babe in 1932, and I flash the hit-and run sign instead and lay down a bunt that drops like a chipped marble. And I run faster than the “Commerce Comet,” then all the way home, faster than herky-jerky Duncan can run after bearing down on me with his sinker, and faster than my mom’s countdown from ten, where at the top of the hallway stairs of our cold-water flat, she asks me where her dish towel is.

I tell her it’s safe at home.

Just Not Fast Enough, Niles

I tied a league ball in it, roped it around twice with jute twine after greasing the pocket with Vaseline and stuffed it in between my mattress and box spring each fall. By spring, my Wilson A2020 “Nellie” Fox baseball mitt was primed for another season.

Through May and June, the days rang with “Hey, batter, batter. Swing batter, swing!” I swung a Duke Snyder Adirondack, but I was Louis Aparicio at the plate—a singles hitter and fast— a sure steal on the base paths. In one game, the rain fouled up my fifth stealing attempt when second base became a buoy. The game was called, and my father and I navigated out of the bog in his brand new 1964 Oldsmobile Starfire, until he asked about my muddy spikes.

We torpedoed across traffic and slid across shoals. He popped open the trunk and hurled them high into the air. I watched the long, mucky laces of my shoes twist in slow-motion until they hit Dempster Street with a dull splash. I held my breath for an eternity; as if dreaming, I dodged the gloom of headlights with one last resolve to swipe one last time, until the entire season suddenly disappeared five times beneath a tractor-trailer’s tires.

In the Cross Hairs

For five days the buck hung from the wrought-iron grate, a large, brown buck, heavy with muscle. Its eyes held the look of an animal about to be shot. Raymond Benedetti, a pharmacist who lived across the street with a half-dozen hunting dogs smelling of musk-rank fur, worked his knife into its belly, unknotting entrails right before my eyes.

It wasn’t until the fifth day that someone complained about the stench and sound of the chainsaw grinding through bone, about the head that lay on the front stoop one evening, its deciduous antlers hacked from the skull. I watched as a young boy would, an accomplice, under a pale gray, Midwestern sky deep in November. The neighbor’s cats kept their distance. The air was charged with pity and thanksgiving.

Suburban Lockup

The door handle was at eye level; the deadbolts: where the doorknob should have been. The wrought-iron storm door held in fears. Everything was keyed from inside, including the metal grates across the basement windows. They propped up a mannequin on their vinyl couch before they left the house – a dummy in a black wig and kimono, the National Enquirer folded on its lap. The neighborhood voyeur might have been aroused had he peeked through the glass. The night burglar might have thought the occupants were kinky, or just lunatics with a shotgun’s trigger wired to spring from a moving hinge. The German Shepherd growled from its cage at every least sound. She could grind bones down with animal ease. Legs would have been no contest for her, just pretzel sticks in a salivating vice grip, had she escaped her paddock.

There was nothing worth stealing: the living room sparkled silver and gold like a 60s’ Slingerland drum set: a medley of Montgomery Ward’s furnishings – plastic-covered couch and chairs, a marble table, hurricane lamps, and a statue of Moses with his 10 commandments were among bric-a-bracs scattered in strata. A five-foot garden statue of Rebecca at the Well stood at the main entrance. The door was bolstered by a wooden cane that buttressed the door handle, just beneath two deadbolts and sliding chain lock. The dining room reflected flock wall-paper and brown wainscot from the smoky mirrors.

The house was eclipsed by awnings and a fortress of evergreens, an invitation for the random thief from the street to test its labyrinth of alarms, its ambush of latches constructed from fears triggered by the Great Depression, the Great War, and the nightly news – a million hands warming over garbage cans, hungry eyes in ski masks.

Jim’s Mom

I rode my bike to Jim’s house as usual to play All⋆Star Baseball on hot summer mornings, rang his door bell twice and waited. But this time, the window sheers parted slightly and Jim’s mom opened the door wearing only a silken half-slip and brassiere. The shell of the wall phone pressed against her ear and long blond hair, wet from bathing.

She said Jim wasn’t home, and I was embarrassed by her large green eyes that flashed no hint of awkwardness, by her body, like one of those models in the lady’s lingerie section of a Spiegel catalogue, that stirred untimely yearnings. Perhaps it was my stuttering or her understanding of a young boy’s gawking that made her smile sweetly then laugh. Even so, my body flushed down to my toes, and I ran home, burnt by the moment, the bike tire still spinning by her door.

-Papa