Painted Cities

1817 S. MAY

My sister and I used to pan for gold. We used to squat along the curb of May Street, with the frying pans our landlady, Betty, would let us use, and sift through the water that flowed from the fire hydrant that our upstairs neighbor, Joe, would open up whenever it was especially hot out. I can remember scooping up mounds of grit from the gutter and turning it over and over in small seesawing circles, convinced that I would one day strike it rich. I suppose, in all our days of panning, if Delia and I had turned in all the glass we collected, all the bottle tops and all the can tabs we found, we might have become millionaires, but probably not. Still, as we made up our separate mounds of would-be valuables, depositing our finds in coffee cans labeled GOLD, SILVER, and DIAMONDS, filling each one up with bottle tops, can tabs, and broken glass, respectively, we thought of how we could one day buy a mansion for my mother, a Jaguar for my father, and how we could leave our apartment to our uncle Pepe, who slept in our pantry along with the chiles and frijoles.

I don’t know where, on the South Side of Chicago, Delia and I got the idea to start panning. It did not seem instinctual, like I later realized looking behind my back every few steps was — something inherently South Side. But we panned for gold nonetheless, devoutly, often consuming entire afternoons sifting through the cold water that flowed like swift-moving streams down the gutters of May Street. Eventually our panning became so routine that when Joe from upstairs would crack open the fire hydrant on those sweltering days when the humidity weighed upon our heads like torture, Betty would simply leave the pans we used outside her first-floor apartment. The moment Delia and I were allowed out, we would race down our apartment building’s steps, scoop up our pans mid-stride, and burst out onto May Street, where we would take up our positions along the running water and begin to sift and pour.

Until our panning, the main attraction on such hot days was watching the older kids play in the huge domes of water they would create with the pumps. An utter mystery for me until well into my youth was what old tires were doing wrapped around all the fire hydrants. Then, early one summer, I caught the older kids of my block wedging a board between the tire and the mouth of our hydrant, creating a ramp, a deflector for the sheer rush of water. The result was an explosion, a cascading bloom of water that when done right could reach the other side of May Street. I realized suddenly the ingenuity of the kids in my neighborhood.

There were battles to see which block reigned supreme, which block could build the most gargantuan dome of water. While there was never any organized contest, no official measurement, no agreed-upon rating system, whenever someone would walk down to a store on Eighteenth Street past the neighboring blocks, he would always return with vivid, detailed accounts of how the “dudes” over on Allport or Throop “got one that’s fucking huge,” and here he would spread his arms in some random inflated measurement. These words seemed to spark something in the residents of my block. When they heard them, they would all inherit the wide, bright eyes of the storyteller, and it would seem suddenly as if there were some greater purpose now, something to band together for — defeat of a neighboring block. So Joe from upstairs would be called, and he would come charging out, barefoot, in his cutoffs, squinting at the exhaust of the cigarette dangling from his mouth, carrying the heavy iron pump key — the tool that allowed him to open the hydrant — and he would slowly, professionally, crank up our water pressure, inflate our dome of water even higher. The valves would creak, beneath the sidewalk the water lines would shudder, everyone would wonder when Joe was going to stop, and then finally he would, and a cheer would go up, and Joe would retreat back upstairs, where I’m sure a Sox game and a six-pack of tall boys were waiting on him.

I felt quite proud that Joe, the miracle worker, he who could feather a pump’s water pressure just enough to give us the most beautiful fire-hydrant creations ever, lived in our building. For the most part, though, and this is a side of Joe that tends to be overlooked, he spent his waking hours drunk or high. He would have loud parties that ended up in fistfights at 3 a.m., people falling down our three-flat’s stairs, creative insults being slung in the stairwell, bottles being thrown on the front sidewalk. Delia and I were often awoken by Joe’s scuffles, and we would look out our front window to see Joe out there either pounding on or being pounded by some similar-looking heavyweight. My father would call the cops (if Betty downstairs hadn’t already) and things would be settled. Joe would crawl back upstairs, we would crawl back into bed, and all would be forgotten. It was routine. Joe gets loud, someone calls the cops, Joe apologizes with a sincere, smiling face to my mother and Betty the next day.

At times, when summer was in full swing and the pump contests were unofficially under way, the block just down from us, just across Nineteenth Street, would try and outdo us with its own fans of water. It occurs to me now that we really had no name for these fans of water. All one had to say was “Man, look at that one,” and it was obvious to all those listening that another oasis had been spotted, another reprieve in our neighborhood’s desert of concrete. To stand beneath one of these great formations, within its massive dome of water, was to be in a completely different world, secluded, excluded, soundless except for the roar of the rushing water. Even the kids standing right next to you could not be heard, though you could see that their mouths were moving, that they were screaming just like you. The test was to see who could stand to be beneath the dome the longest. And then, upon exiting, the most excruciating task of all was to become real again. You would run to someone, the first person you saw, and start bragging about how great it was to have been beneath the dome so long. Or, if you were younger, as I was, you would run full speed to your mother, and act as if you had just performed some great feat of courage, some act beyond human comprehension, like the scaling of a monstrously high chain-link fence, the rescue of a baseball from a dog-infested yard, anything to get a reaction, a confirmation that you were there, that people could hear you and that you could hear them. At any one time during those summers, there were hordes of lost individuals, newly escaped from the great domes of water, running around frantic, trying to reestablish some sense of being in the real world.

From where our pump was, the kids down the block looked like miniature figurines, pet people running about, yapping, like windup toys. They were our block’s biggest rivals, and they had their own Joe, a fat man who would walk out with a pump key and turn up their water pressure whenever dominance needed to be established. Often, their routine, their unspoken challenge, was to turn up the pressure of their pump and wait for a response from us. Then Joe would come out, determined, nonchalant with confidence, and the domes of water would begin to rise in battle. Their group would cheer when theirs got higher. We would cheer when Joe got ours higher. The valves would screech; within our cracked sidewalk the pipes would moan like the hull of a sinking ship. We would cringe at every turn of Joe’s wrench. Inevitably, at least from what I remember, Joe would feather out just enough water pressure so that we never reached our breaking point — the point at which our board snapped in half and shot out across the street with enough speed to kill someone. But just in case, when our battles with the next block began, everyone left the area of water flow and fell in behind Joe, where we could cheer in safety.

We always won. The block down from us had a history of shoddy pump construction. The minute theirs would give, they would all yell in disappointment. Sometimes a little voice could be heard echoing down the block—“Next time, assholes, we’ll get you next time.” And they would set to building their dome up once again — runners sent off in search of new boards, water pressure inched back up to a respectable level. Joe would accept congratulations, restore our pump’s normal flow, and everything would resume, things would go back to normal: kids running in and out of the water, experiencing sudden losses upon entering and desperate struggles upon exiting.

There was a layer of grit settled at the bottom of May Street’s gutters, and possibly, this is what sparked the idea to start panning. Maybe, at some point, one of us had scooped up a handful of this grit and suddenly discovered diamonds and precious minerals. Maybe one of us had looked at the other with the astonished face of a scientist who has just made an inadvertent discovery — a face of excitement — a face filled with the feelings one tries to quell by saying, “Wait a minute. I need to try this again.” And maybe we did try again, and came up with more jewels and riches, and soon this prompted us to start panning, like early Californians — ghetto forty-niners.

At first we must’ve looked like fools, Delia and I, leaning over the curb, sifting through the heavy till of the gutters. But soon we became pioneers, and it was not long before the other kids of our block began prospecting as well: Little Joey from the apartment building next door and his sister, Genie; Mario León, the son of the corner grocer; and even Peety, the eight-year-old pool-shark, whose father owned the corner tavern. I seem to remember Delia saying to me once, “They’re taking all our gold,” but I am not sure if this is actual memory. Though this seems like something my sister would have said (she was the more enterprising of the two of us), it seems also that Delia and I almost never spoke while we did our panning; rather, we just squatted there, elbows between our knees, hands turning over and over, primed to pluck our riches.

Gold was, of course, the most sought-after of the precious commodities we panned for. But often we found diamonds and silver as well. Delia, when she would come across those rare green diamonds (shattered pieces of a 7UP bottle), or those blue ones (who knows what these were from), would hold them up to the sunlight and squint like a jeweler; then she would plunk them in the appropriately labeled coffee can and grunt, as if saying to herself, Damn, now that was a good one. I, on the other hand, often skipped over the diamonds, and instead focused in on the gold — those gold-colored 7UP bottle caps, preferably the ones with the red 7UP insignia still visible on them. But Delia, glitter queen that she was, went for the diamonds, the glass, and always had Band-Aids on her fingers because of it. This became a precautionary measure for her after a time, and I am sure that if my mother had ever found out what was happening to all the Band-Aids, she would have forbade us from ever prospecting again. As it was, though, my mother had no idea, and Delia would wrap her fingers and dig in, pulling up colored glass, holding it to the sunlight, and occasionally looking over at me with the sparkle in her eyes that I came to understand as my sister daydreaming about what she would do with our fortune.

We discussed our plans late at night in the bed we shared. Much to the disgust of Delia, my ideas on what we would do with our fortune focused more on family matters: how a move up to a mansion might benefit our other family members, for example, Pepe moving out of the pantry and taking over the apartment, and my cousin Chuey, who often slept on our kitchen floor when his wife kicked him out, moving in to the pantry. There were other ideas as well: how we might purchase a van for my uncle Max, so his chile-delivering business could prosper, how we could pay for my aunt Chachie to become a doctor and guarantee ourselves free medical care for the rest of our lives. These were all even trades, I figured, arrangements that would in some way benefit each one of us. But Delia had different ideas — ideas that seemed more along the lines of what millionaires might really do with their fortunes.

“A pool,” she would say as we lay there in the dark. “For the back of the mansion, we have to have a pool. And a dug-in one too, like they have in The Beverly Hillbillies.” And when Delia would say this I would imagine her eyes lighting up like they always did when she thought of such amazing things. At times, there in the dark, I turned to see if the walls on her side of the bed had actually lit up with the glow.

Our apartment on May Street was a reflection of the street itself — small and cramped. It was for this reason that Delia and I slept in the same bed, and shared a room with my parents, and why my uncle slept in our pantry. I suppose if we had all sat down and thought about it, someone would’ve come to the conclusion that “Gee, this apartment is too small,” but the thought never entered our minds — or maybe it did. Maybe it was always there, lingering, when I would fall asleep on my uncle’s mattress in his pantry/bedroom and he would kick me out because there wasn’t enough room for the both of us, when we had to turn our mattresses up so that my parents’ party guests wouldn’t spill beer on them or singe them with cigarettes, when my cousin Chuey would come over, drunk, kicked out of his own apartment up the block, and fall asleep facedown on our kitchen floor. Delia and I would eat cold cereal and watch Saturday-morning cartoons as he slept at our feet, snoring, moaning, gyrating his pelvis as if having nasty dreams. There were no problems then. For us it was all routine.

And maybe our entire block felt the same. Maybe the entire neighborhood, with its towering church steeples, its neon signs, its liquor stores all crammed together like they were missing space to breathe, maybe everyone who lived there felt that way. So much so that the crampedness, the density, was just another thing you “understood,” like the humidity during the summer, like the fact that Joe or any of the other drunks or dope addicts might need the cops called on them, like the feeling that we needed to get into pump battles with the people on the next block. The fact that I could hear Little Joey’s parents, in the apartment building next door, arguing about how Joey’s father slept with other women, never entered my mind. The fact that my parents screamed about what was happening to all our money, then turned around and made discreet love on the other side of our bedroom, wasn’t a bother. I noticed, but mostly I didn’t. Mostly at night, when all the families in the neighborhood would get to arguing and sex, I would lie with Delia and talk about fortunes, about pools and about great schemes that would affect each member of my family forever. All these things, these feelings of crampedness, these feelings of being locked down in close quarters, simply were. They were undeniable facts that fell so far back in the mind one could sit on the front stoop and drink a cold beer, or, in the case of the younger kids on the block, squat on the curb and pan for gold.

Back then, it seems, there was something more romantic about living in a ghetto, in poverty, with too many members of your family; or maybe I was simply too young to have made an honest distinction between what was real — the gunshots, the suspicious fires, the deaths — and what was fake, or imaginary — the precious jewels, the gold Delia and I used to strike in the gutters. I’ve tried explaining out loud to myself that any person, any child, with imagination enough, need enough, to turn chips of broken glass into diamonds, bottle tops into gold, certainly has enough imagination to reverse the entire situation of his youth, turn it all into a fairyland of lowriders, loud radios, sexy women with long dark hair, short-shorts, and deep red lips. But the fact remains that May Street was a place where I saw drunken men brawling to the death, I saw wives get beat by their husbands, I saw children get hit by cars and then watched those cars get chased down by neighbors and the drivers get beat into bloody pulps.

Early one summer morning Delia and I were awakened by my parents and told to get out of the building. I remember distinctly the smell of smoke, the sound of sirens and the distorted chatter of police radios. I remember also, distinctly, being convinced that someone had set our apartment building on fire, thinking to myself, What did we do? and running through a list of possible reasons why someone might have wanted to burn our place down—Has my father been cheating on my mother? Did Joe mess up a drug deal? As I ran down the stairs, led by my uncle, followed by Delia and my parents, I remember thinking also that something must be saved, that a dog or cat must be rescued. And though I am sure I got this idea from some TV commercial for fire alarms, or some newscast of a suburban rescue of a cat or dog, some middle-class situation far removed from the reality of May Street, I still felt there was something I needed to save.

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.