The Old Neighborhood (2 page)

Lil Pat was the tallest of 'em. His shoulders were set close, and only his profile revealed his large, low-hung pot-belly. They were somewhere between greasers, cholos, and jocks. Some wore shirts with sports logos, or sweatpants and Dago T's, and some wore oil-stained Dickies. Some had buzzed heads, and others had slicked back hair with the sides almost shaved. Their voices rose and fell in that squeaky Chicago slang. They were a dying breed. The great white flight was siphoning their numbers. The neighborhood was changing.

“Aye, Joey,” Lil Pat yelled. “C'mere,” he said, waving his hairy knuckled hand. He'd walked up to an older woman and a redheaded kid my age. I jogged over.

“Hey, did you ever meet Ryan?” Lil Pat asked.

I shook my head no.

“Well, he's Mickey's nephew,” he said, nodding towards where Mickey stood. Mickey's stout build poured out of his Dago T. His face flexed as he spoke to the hood next to him.

I looked at the kid in front of me—Ryan. He was like a mini-Mickey. His hair was in a short buzz cut, and he had the same pit bull face, but softer, rounder, and covered with a spattering of dark-brown freckles. He wore old, grayed Adidas with thick blue laces that made me wonder if he was very poor.

“Well, shake hands or somethin'. Jesus,” Lil Pat said, furrowing his brow and shaking his head. “What's wrong wit you?” He slid his palm the wrong way through my slicked back hair, so I had to fix it.

“What's up?” Ryan and I said at the same time. Both of us looked down.

I noticed a thick gold bracelet on his wrist.

“Nice gold,” I said.

“Thanks,” Ryan replied, looking at the tips of my scuffed up Air Jordans. “Nice rope. I got one like dat at home.”

“Well, you two go on an' play,” Lil Pat urged, dragging his fingers through his trimmed goatee and mustache. “An' stay outta trouble you little shit.” We both smiled.

Ryan and I made quick friends, and soon we were laughing and playing with the other kids—white, black and Mexican kids—dipping and dodging through the maze of grown-ups.

•

THE GUNSHOT WAS ABRUPT.
It sent a torrent of reactions through the mass of people. Some of the hoods dove under the folding tables. Father McCale smirked and jammed both of his index fingers in his ears like it was a firecracker. No one seemed to know which direction it had come from. I saw it though—the fire from the barrel. I watched Lil Pat run and jump the beer garden fence in the direction of the tall, skinny Assyrian kid who held the pistol to his leg. A line of gray smoke leaked from the barrel and slithered up his wrist. The confusion continued as the Assyrian sprinted down the alley with Lil Pat and Mickey giving chase close behind. Ryan and I darted after them as they ran down the alley and turned right. A wild, menacing laughter erupted from Lil Pat and Mickey. I glanced at Ryan sprinting beside me. He looked as scared as I felt. We ran as fast as we could, but they pulled away from us as we turned at the T in the alley. Their shoes clapped the pavement as my Jordans slipped on the dusty, pebble-ridden concrete.

They sprinted across Ashland Ave. and through the Jewel parking lot. Ryan and I crossed Ashland. A rusty pickup truck honked its horn as we cut in front of it. My heart banged in my ears. Across the half-empty parking lot, the Assyrian disappeared through the front door of the pharmacy, with Lil Pat and Mickey close behind. The laughter rose to high hilarity. As we approached the pharmacy, I heard the screams from inside, but no gun shot. We stood there at the open door as the neon-green light from the sign in the window poured out and stained the sidewalk at our feet. We peered in at the long rows of shelving units that ran back to the counter; there wasn't a soul in sight, just the screams and a deep, leaden crunching. Then, the sound dampened. The laughter plummeted to a bubbling, demonic gurgle. There was a blur of motion. Ryan grabbed my arm and pulled me toward another doorway. We crammed in and pressed our backs to the glass door. Lil Pat emerged from the drug store with Mickey right behind him. Their laughter fizzled into a popping giggle. Their hands were as red as butchers' to the forearms, and there was a bulge in Lil Pat's blood-speckled waistband. As they jogged out, Lil Pat's shirt rose up above his belt, and I saw the wet wooden pistol grip. They glanced up and down Clark Street, wild-eyed, and then hung a left and disappeared into the darkness of the side street.

The screaming continued inside. It was a woman's voice, and it was the only voice that could be heard. There was a quick panting between each scream. I listened as I hid there with Ryan beside me. Our chests heaved. The patter of Lil Pat and Mickey's steps dissipated. We entered the drug store wordless. The woman screamed like she was falling into an endless, black abyss, it rang in my ears. Trembling, we walked towards it. I saw the dark-red puddle on the floor slowly expanding like a shadow across the green and grey tiles. I walked closer to the puddle's edge where I saw the young man motionless—eyes still open. A deep crack above his eye ran up his forehead and into his hair. Thick blood oozed slowly from the wound, wetting his frizzy black hair. His bottom jaw hung open and was cocked to the side of his narrow, dark face like it had been dislodged from its hinge. The woman screamed deeper into the abyss, crumpled on the ground with the phone trembling in her hand. Her torso shook terribly. The puddle enveloped her legs and soaked the underside of her brown nylons. I looked at them in silent mourning—for the young man and something that I hadn't words for. We slipped out of the store as others poured in through the doorway.

We walked towards home in the quiet—our heads hung. The weight of it all around us. The air was thick, and the carnival roared on in the distance. The sound of the children's joyous screams rose and fell, but I had no urge to return. We walked down Clark to Hollywood Ave., where the yellow sign of the corner store glowed stale and flickered. We stood there under it a while.

“You think dey're gonna get caught up?” I asked.

“Naw, there ain't nobody gonna rat dem out.”

“Shit… He was dead wadn't he.”

Ryan didn't answer. We walked down and crossed Ashland with the sirens floating in the air. Ryan went his way to the north, and I went home. I went up to my room and sat on the bed a while in the dark as the orange-yellow of the streetlight seeped in through the window. I thought about God. I thought about heaven and if Lil Pat could ever go there now. I wondered if I could go there now that I knew what I knew and was never gonna tell. I held my crucifix and prayed to Jesus that he wasn't dead. After the others had gone to sleep, I went downstairs to the TV room and watched the reports of the murder.

And that was the birth of Pistol Pat.

•

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID,
all I ever wanted to be was the baddest kid on the block. At least that's what I thought I longed for; deep down, all I wanted was for my family to stay together, but I didn't find that out 'til later.

My Ma got pregnant with Lil Pat when she was thirteen and the old man was fourteen, and they had to go down to Tennessee to get married 'cause at their age it was illegal in the State of Illinois.

The far North Side was a strange place back then. Uptown and Edgewater were full of hillbillies from West Virginia who came looking for work, found it, and stayed. Their hillbilly family vendettas came with them. Rifle volleys resounded over Sheridan Ave. from one low-rent high-rise to the next. Folk music flourished. John Prine, Steve Goodman, Fred Holstein—all of them spewed out of the North Side of Chicago.

At first, my family lived on the second floor of my grandmother's two-flat. It was right there on Olive Ave. in-between Ashland and Hermitage Ave. in the St. Greg's Parish. The old man had evolved from street thug, to car thief, to cat burglar, to repo man. In other words, he'd gone pro. And Ma was babysitting. They had three raccoons and a fox as pets. Then, they had Blake. He was a sick baby—had a heart defect—but don't worry, he grew up to be probably the biggest and strongest of the brothers. Richard was born a couple years later, and everybody said, “Look at the size of the feet on that kid! He's gonna be a giant!” but he never broke six feet.

Ma started to worry that my Dad was only gonna give her boys, and she really wanted a little girl. So she thought of adoption, but DCFS was already breathing down her neck because she was running an illegal babysitting outfit out of the apartment, though the only thing illegal was that she had too many kids. What DCFS didn't understand was that Ma was really good at taking care of ten to twelve kids at a time, in addition to her own.

She'd read an article in the Trib about adoption and found out that you could adopt kids from third world countries really easy. She and my old man looked into it and started saving. Next thing you know, they're on a flight to Puerto Rico to change planes and head to the Dominican Republic to adopt a little girl.

My Dad had earned himself quite a reputation as a tough guy in quite a tough neighborhood at quite a tough time in Chicago. Well, he ends up in the pisser at the airport in Puerto Rico, and he says when he walked in there was a uniformed cop standing at the door. So there he is pissing at a urinal when three “Spanish guys” (they weren't from Spain, though) walk in and step up behind him in this empty bathroom. Pin-prickles dance up his back and neck. The three of them stood in complete silence behind him, though all the other urinals were open. Dad figured they weren't gonna wait for him to finish, so he didn't wait either. With his thang hanging out in mid-stream, he spun around on them. He said he'd never kicked anyone in the face harder in his whole life, which means something because he had a long, storied history of kicking people very hard in the face. At the end, he grabbed the last of them by the head and broke the porcelain urinal with the guy's cheekbone. When Dad walked out, the cop at the door had evaporated. Interpol grabbed him, and my Ma didn't know where the hell he was 'cause he didn't inform her that he was going to the john.

Anyway, somehow they made it to the Dominican Republic. An adoption agent took them miles inland along winding dirt roads to a tiny village full of huts. They literally lived in a shack made of scrap metal and salvaged wood with chickens and lizards running around on the dirt floor. The girl's family was comprised of thirteen children from two fathers—the first had passed. My parents went for the infant, but the birth mother urged them to also take the second-youngest in the belief that her children would get a chance at a better life in America. The negotiation took place as giant, black hornets swooped in to kill the tarantulas. The second-youngest was a little girl about to turn three, and somehow Ma convinced Dad, so they came home with not one but two little, dark-brown, frizzy-haired angels. They named the youngest Rose and the older one Jan, but they'd forever be known as Jan'n'Rose and have their names be confused by all of our family, even though Rose was much lighter skinned and taller than Jan, who was dark and small-framed with a fiery temper. I came into the picture about a year later. A “late-in-life baby” my Ma always said, but she was just twenty-seven. It was a different time.

•

LIL PAT BECOMING A MURDERER
didn't spark off out of the blue. We could feel it coming—in the family and in the neighborhood.

The TJOs sprouted up in Edgewater in the '60s. The original name was the “Thorndale Jarvis Organization.” They were a fairly organized stone greaser gang that hung out right under the Thorndale stop on the Red Line directly across from the huge dark brick armory where I took gymnastics as a little boy. Their real estate ran between there and the Jarvis stop on the Red Line. Under the leadership of Joe Ganci and Bob Kellas, the gang flourished, and membership skyrocketed to over 200 members in the early '70s. At one point, there was a whole juvenile courtroom full of TJOs on a variety of charges. The judge's name was Reynolds, and he was known for his hot temper and quick wit. After he'd sentenced the twelfth TJO to appear that day, he looked up and said, “What is this TJO crap anyway? These guys are nothing but a bunch of Thorndale Avenue Jag Offs.”

The name stirred uproarious approval through the entire courtroom, and the gang forever changed the official name to the Thorndale Avenue Jag Offs.

The older TJOs had slightly biker-ish leanings and at times called themselves “Thieves Junkies and Outlaws.” Eventually, they garnered the attention of Sonny Barger and his crew, and the Hell's Angels would sporadically stop by and pay the neighborhood a visit while on their countrywide tours of wreaking havoc. It was around then that the TJOs began dealing heroin. Some say it was the Angels that biked it in, concealing it in their fuel tanks, but others say it was the Mob, who Ganci and Kellas started doing low-level hits for. Those hits eventually got the both of them pinched on a murder rap, but during the months-long trial, they both miraculously escaped from Cook County Jail in a week that saw seven inmates escape, including one who was in the county hospital for a stab wound and just walked out of the front door in broad daylight. Needless to say, it was a bad week for those friendly confines that the regulars lovingly called “California” due to its location on California Ave. Both men were caught within weeks. Ganci took the plunge and got natural life, and Kellas got ten on conspiracy to commit murder.

Mickey's big brother and Ryan's dad, Rick Reid, took charge and brought the TJOs into the '80s until he got in a traffic dispute on Clark, ripped a guy out of his car window, and beat him to death in front of his wife and child. In the process, he nearly exposed the long-running extortion ring the TJOs had going with the businesses on Broadway and Clark, between Thorndale Ave. and Foster Ave. Word was that Rick went into a bar across the street while the ambulance hauled the guy away, and the police began to question people on the sidewalk right in front of him. The entire neighborhood claimed they didn't see anything. Mind you, the assault occurred in the middle of a busy Saturday afternoon on Clark. All the press brought on a big two-year investigation in an attempt to link heroin, extortion, murder-for-hire, and all-around Chi-town All-Star thuggery. The smart-ass TJOs decided to sue the City of Chicago and the Chicago Police on charges of harassment, and it actually got before a judge before being thrown out for its utter ridiculousness.