Painted Cities

FREEDOM

I knew Buff before he was a Latin Count, before he was shot dead. His real name was David. I heard his aunt call him that once, when we were on top of the old pierogi factory. “David!” she called out. And Buff looked at me. “Shit,” he said. He dropped the rock he had in his hand and went running across the gravel roof. He climbed over the air-conditioning unit and disappeared. I was up there alone then. I looked over the ledge onto Twenty-Second Street, the traffic. I looked at the kids playing swifties in the school playground across the street. I dropped my rock and climbed down as well. Throwing rocks wasn’t fun unless you did it with someone.

David, or Buff, thought different. I had first met him a few months before, when my father had sent me to the A&P to get some milk. I was approaching the pierogi factory, just across Oakley Avenue. It was hot out that day; the sun felt somehow closer. WHACK! I heard. Across the street, a CTA bus screeched to a stop. The driver turned and stared back at me. Behind him, one of the large safety-glass windows had been shattered — a cool, spiderweb-like pattern spread over the entire pane. I looked to the sidewalk and continued walking. Finally, the bus moved on.

After it had crossed Western Avenue I turned and looked behind me. There, on the pierogi factory roof, standing at the ledge, was a boy my age, maybe a little younger, wearing a white T-shirt. His head was shaved. He had big ears and a smile that made him look something like Dopey from Snow White. He nodded at me as if he knew who I was.

“How’d you get up there?” I asked him.

“Around the back,” he said. His speech was quick, almost hyper. At the end of his sentence he sucked his tongue, like he was fighting back saliva. Then he disappeared beyond the ledge.

I continued on to the A&P. I kept looking back. I imagined couches up there, tables, a secret hideaway. I was jealous. The pierogi factory roof was one of the last frontiers of my neighborhood. It was only two cinder-block stories high, but its remoteness, its sheer walls, made hiding up there seem equal to never having been born.

The second time we met we became friends. I had figured out how to get up onto the roof myself. The key was the chain-link fence that enclosed the factory’s dumpster — at one corner the fence could be scaled, and then it was a matter of balance, a tightroper’s balance, skirting lines of barbed wire to the factory’s air ducts. After a leap to the thin sheet metal of the ducts, it was like climbing playground slides in reverse. Once, twice, three times, and suddenly you were there. It was amazing how easy it was. The pierogi factory roof had always seemed so impenetrable. I’d scaled garages. I’d scaled abandoned warehouse fire escapes. I’d even scaled the Western Avenue L stop, using the steel straps that held the support beams together as footholds. But I’d only ever dreamed about gaining the roof of the pierogi factory. That first time up there I surveyed the terrain: blank, empty, a white-gravel roof with a huge, green-painted air-conditioning unit. I was disappointed. Still, no one else I knew had ever been up there. Except, of course, for Buff, whose name I didn’t even know yet.

It was a beautiful view, Twenty-Second Street, the street I lived on. I’d walked Twenty-Second so many times I knew every crack and buckle of its dilapidated sidewalks. But seeing it from two stories up, seeing each expanse of concrete imperfection, was awesome. The sidewalks seemed to make sense from up there; one could almost read the streets, the way they dipped and turned, how the sidewalk simply followed suit. I took a seat on the ledge of the roof and picked up a rock. I dropped it down to the sidewalk, waited for the sharp snap.

Across the street a large group of gangbangers, Disciples, were playing basketball. Their voices echoed loud and clear off the school building behind. “Ball! Ball!” they called out. “Foul, motherfucker! Goddamn!” It occurred to me that from up there I could be a spy if I wanted to. I could climb the roof late at night when the Disciples were having their meetings and overhear plans for drive-bys, cocaine sales, turf wars. It occurred to me that I could go to the Laflin Lovers or the Bishops, archrivals of the Disciples, and sell their secrets. I was hatching plans, schemes, when suddenly, behind me, the gravel churned.

He was there, standing. He was short, much shorter than he looked from two stories down. He was younger-looking as well.

“Ha!” he said. “I knew it, bro! I knew you’d find the way up here.” He sucked spit. “You climbed the fence, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Ha, I knew it!” he said. “No one else knows how to get up here. Just you and me.”

I thought about this. In the end the climb hadn’t seemed that difficult.

“Yeah,” he said. “No one knows…”

He sat down next to me. He scooped up a handful of rocks. He had blue eyes. This was strange. He was Mexican, just like me; he had dark skin, dirty summer skin, but he also had these almost pastel-blue eyes. His face was lit up. He was smiling.

He shook his handful of rocks, loosing a couple. He looked down to the street. The noise of the basketball players came to us. “Center. Ball!” His eyes moved to the kids on the court.

“That’s my cousin over there,” he said. “Right there, see, the one with the ball.” He looked down to his handful of rocks, shook another couple free. “His name is Junebug. He’s a D. He’s a little crazy.”

I studied the kid with the ball. I’d seen him before. He looked like the type that liked to corner younger kids against the walls and ask them, “What you be about?” I avoided kids like him, crossed the street when I saw them coming.

“He shot me with a BB gun,” Buff said. “Like three days ago.” He pulled up his T-shirt and showed me. On his belly were three small welts, each holding a tiny, deep, dark pit in its center.

“He shot you?” I said.

“Yeah,” Buff said. He laughed. He let his shirt down. “Ha ha, it didn’t even hurt!” He looked down to his handful of rocks, shook out another two.

“You should go to the doctor,” I told him.

“I should, right?” he said. “Aaaa.”

Buff looked out over the ledge. By this time there was only one rock left from his handful. He looked far down the street.

“All right, bro, here it comes,” he said. And then, in a split second, Buff jumped to his feet, fired his rock over the ledge, and ducked back down. I followed him, ducking too. I heard a loud POP, then a long screech of tires.

“Damn, bro, that was a cop car!” Buff said. “I got them, bro! I got the Law!”

I stayed low. I didn’t want to see.

After a few moments I couldn’t help it. If it was the cops, I thought it might be better if I turned myself in. I peeked over. Down on the street, a fat man wearing a red baseball cap was inspecting the shattered windshield of a rusted green station wagon. The man was dirty, sweaty, like he’d been working all day. His car didn’t appear to have any backseats, only chunks of concrete filling the space from the driver’s seat all the way to the tailgate. Stuck out of the back window was a bent metal pole with a red bandanna tied to its end. Two other people were down there, a couple. “Pinche cabrones,” the man said. He shook his head and took his cap off. “Pendejos,” he said. He rested his forearms on the roof of his car and then brought his head down. The couple walked away.

I tucked back down behind the ledge.

“It was the cops, wasn’t it, bro?” Buff asked.

“Yes,” I told him. “I think it was the narcs or something.” I swallowed hard.

“I knew it, bro,” Buff said. “I knew it was the cops. My name is Buff,” he said. He sucked spit.

“Jesse,” I told him. I shook his hand.

That summer we were inseparable. I found out Buff was ten, the same age as me, although he looked like he could be a year younger, maybe even two. I found out that he lived on the North Side, but that he was spending the summer with his aunt on Twenty-Fourth Place because “people” were after him. I asked who the “people” were but he didn’t want to tell me. He said: “Maybe you know them. I don’t want to start any shit.”

I also found out that Buff was going to be a father. That he had a girlfriend named Letty who occasionally visited him. She was seven months’ pregnant, Buff said.

“Isn’t your family mad?” I asked him.

“Yeah, but what are they going to do?” Buff said. “Besides, we’re in love.” I nodded like I knew love could be the reason for anything.

One afternoon we were up on the roof drinking some Cokes I had bought from Midwest corner store. I was staring up into the sky, listening to the traffic. Buff was looking over the ledge. We were talking about cars, maybe, or what prison was like. And then Buff said: “Look, there she is. There she is, bro. That’s Letty.” I turned and looked over the ledge. Across the street a group of girls were talking to some of the basketball players. “The one with the white shirt,” Buff said. I looked to her. She was pretty. In fact, to me, at my age then, she was beautiful. She was thin, tall. She had short, dark hair. She looked like an older girl, like she was in high school. She smiled a lot, seemed genuinely happy about things. When she talked she moved her hands. When the boys spoke to her, she rolled her eyes. She did not look pregnant.

“That’s Letty?” I asked Buff.

“Yeah, bro,” he said. “I forgot to tell you she was coming down here today.”

“She’s talking to all those D’s,” I told him.

“I know,” he said. “That’s her cousins. Most of those guys down there.”

I watched the girl move. I watched her pull back her hair as if she could put it in a ponytail. I heard her laugh out loud once. It was a deep laugh, like she had never been unhappy.

Finally, she and her friends walked away. When they were in the middle of the block Buff yelled out, “Let-ty!” He tucked down behind the ledge. “I don’t want her to see me, bro,” he whispered. “She doesn’t like it when I call out her name like that.” I lowered my head but continued to watch. The girl turned and looked behind her. In the playground the boys were already back to their game. She looked in front of her, across the street. She looked to her friends. They all laughed together.

“Did she look?” Buff asked.

“Yes,” I told him.

“Damn, she knew it was me,” he said. “She’s going to be pissed later.” He shook his head.

I rested my chin on the ledge and watched as the group of girls walked away. Buff came up and watched as well.

“Those girls are bitches,” he said. “They talk too much.”

This is how we spent our time. Sometimes throwing rocks, but mostly just talking. Buff showing me things, telling me what it was like to sniff cocaine. In truth, I don’t think I believed much of what Buff said. I simply went along with it.

One afternoon he asked me if I’d ever smoked angel dust. “Yes,” I said. “It’s crazy, right?” Buff asked. “Yes,” I answered.

I often wonder if Buff knew I was lying. But up on the roof, between the two of us, it didn’t seem to matter. Sometimes I even question whether I actually spent a summer on that gravel roof, but then I think about what happened, and I know that I did.

The idea came to us at night. Back then my rule for coming home was the streetlights. When the streetlights came on I was to start heading home, no matter where I was. I followed the same rule when I was up on the roof, but I dawdled. I was only a block away from home. When I arrived and my father asked where I had been, I told him that I had been at Harrison Park, or some other place that took equally long to return from.

It was during the time the streetlights came on that we devised our plan. This was always quiet time. The time when the traffic changed from hectic shoppers and those returning home from work, to those simply cruising or heading out to parties. From the pierogi factory roof we could see clear over to California Avenue, where the mirror-windowed court building was lit up with the orange of the setting sun, the same color orange as the streetlights, which within minutes would flood up at us, shining over the ledge.

We lay there silently, on our backs, absorbing the heat of the day as it rose off the roof.

“Hey, bro,” Buff suddenly said. “Wouldn’t it be cool to live up here?”

I took a deep breath. I had my eyes closed. I felt as if time were holding still. “Yes,” I answered.

“I was thinking maybe we could build a house up here,” Buff said. “Like no one else would know. It would just be our secret.”

I heard Buff move against the gravel, switching positions. I opened my eyes, looked up into the deepening purple sky.

“Maybe you and Letty could live up here,” I told him. “Maybe we could even put a crib up here for your baby.” I looked to Buff. He was leaning on one arm, looking down at me.

“Damn, that would be straight, right?” Buff said. “It would be like an apartment. We’d share it with you too. Like if you got a lady or something. I’d just tell Letty we had to go. You could have a dinner up here.”

“Like candles and everything, right?” I asked him.

“Yeah, bro, just like that.”

“But we’d need a table and chairs…”

“I know,” Buff said. “And a bed, maybe a small table for the living room, some carpet or linoleum.”

“Walls,” I said. “And what about a roof…?” I considered the impossibility of the idea. Buff turned and looked out over the ledge. The streetlights were full power now; his face was bright orange. I closed my eyes. I thought about the hobos who lived under the bridge on Western Avenue. I thought about their homes, built of old doors, scraps of wood, sheets of metal. I opened my eyes again, looked into the nearly starless sky, the type of lonely sky one sees only in the city.

“Maybe we could find some wood,” I said. I turned onto my side. “I know my father has a piece of metal, like a big tray. Maybe we could use that as a roof.”

“That would be perfect, bro,” Buff said. “I saw some wood the other day by the A&P.”

“I could bring nails and a hammer,” I said.

“I got some rope,” Buff said.

“Cool,” I replied, even though I wasn’t sure what we’d need the rope for.

“Tomorrow,” Buff said. “We’ll start tomorrow.”

I agreed.

That night I went home thinking of possibilities. When I walked through my door it was easily an hour and half after the streetlights had come on.

“Where the hell were you?” my father asked. His glare was familiar.

“At the park, playing basketball,” I told him.

I felt a shift in his breathing. He was trying to keep himself from exploding.

“Did you win at least?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and I quickly went to my room. I felt as if that was one of the last lies I’d ever tell my father.

The next day Buff and I met in the alley behind the factory. It was so early the neighborhood was still asleep, so early that what little traffic there was had time to echo between apartment buildings. Buff was holding a coiled-up line of dirty yellow rope.

“You want to get the wood first?” he asked.

“We should get that tray,” I told him. “I don’t know when my father will wake up.”

“All right,” Buff said. He put the rope around his neck like a sling, like a mountaineer ready for a climb. We walked the block back to my house. I let Buff in through the back gate, down into my gangway. The screen door that had fallen off last winter was up against the building next door. The front gate that had rusted free two summers ago was leaning against our building’s back wall. Used tires that my father had plans to sell were stacked around the sewer cover. I unlocked the back door, then gave it a jolt with my shoulder — the only way the door would open. I led Buff down the stone steps into the basement. Led him past the furnace, past my bedroom, around the corner to where the tin sheet was.

“That’s it, bro?” Buff asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s perfect,” he said.

He grabbed one side. I grabbed the other. We carried the piece of metal through the basement, our feet occasionally knocking against a corner, making a deep gong sound that I felt sure would wake my father upstairs.

When we got to the gangway I turned to shut my door.

“You got a nice house,” Buff said. “Two floors and everything.”

“It’s not that nice,” I said. “You should see the upstairs.”

We walked the piece of metal back to the pierogi factory, leaned it against the cinder-block wall of the gangway. “I’ll let the rope down,” Buff said. And in a few minutes, above me, I heard Buff’s voice.

“Ready?” he called down. He sucked spit like he always did. He tossed the yellow rope over the ledge. I took the end and wrapped the sheet metal as best I could.

“Okay,” I told him.

And slowly, very slowly, the sheet of metal began to rise. I ran around the back, climbed the roof, and helped Buff pull it the rest of the way. We got the sheet to the top. We reached out and yanked the piece over the ledge. We sat on the gravel roof and breathed. A breeze was blowing now. Real traffic had started up on Twenty-Second Street. I looked at the rusted piece of metal and then looked to Buff. He was smiling, smiling the way he had that first time I met him. I smiled back. We were building a house now. It was only a matter of time.

The rest came easy. The wood Buff had found was really stacks of discarded truck pallets. We pulled them apart, pried off the healthy planks, scraped off the pieces of wilted lettuce and rotting tomato. We carried the planks three or four at a time back to the pierogi factory. After we tired of carrying, we hoisted them up to the roof and began construction.

After a few days the work became habit. In a week or so we had a solid frame. In another week the metal roof was in place, built of the tin sheet we had found in my basement and a piece of corrugated metal we’d discovered in a warehouse dumpster on Rockwell Avenue. Next we built the walls.

The room was small, maybe five by five. It was short, but tall enough for either of us to stand up in. Over the weeks of construction, the idea of having a separate living room and dining room had given way to what we were actually capable of: one single room. But really, that one room was enough. It was all ours.

The crowning achievement had been the mattress. Buff had located it one morning while walking to the factory — to “work,” as we had started to call it. He didn’t even bother climbing the roof. Instead, from the alley, he called up to me.

“I found a bed,” he said. “Hurry before someone takes it.”

Quickly, I slid down the air ducts. I walked the fence and then jumped down to the alley. Together we ran the few blocks to where Buff had spotted the mattress.

It was small. The mattress was from a cot or a child’s bed. It was sitting folded over in a dirt patch off the cement of the alley. I pulled it open. It was stained in the middle, soiled like the mattresses in the attic of my house, old mattresses left over from whoever had lived there before, kids not potty-trained, old people unable to get up, drunks. Buff must’ve seen the look on my face.

“This side it’s not that bad,” he said. He twisted the mattress so I could see the back side.

He was right. The other side was cleaner.

We carried the mattress through the alleys of the neighborhood. Every half block or so we set it down to adjust our grip. Other kids from the neighborhood stopped their baseball games, their football games, to let us pass.

Finally, we were home. We dropped the mattress in the gangway of the pierogi factory. We rolled it up like a thick sausage. The mattress smelled dank, sweet almost, like weeds in the sun, like an alley in the summer.

Buff climbed the roof and let the rope down. I wrapped it around the mattress. “Okay!” I called up to Buff. The yellow line went taut.

The bed was actually easier to lift than the piece of tin or even the wood had been. The bed seemed to bounce right up the wall, and when it got to the ledge, another strong jerk popped it right over onto the gravel roof. Immediately, we carried it into the house. We undid the knot and let it flop onto the floor. It was a perfect fit. The mattress lay snug against the rear wall, snug between the two side walls. Along the wall that held the doorway, there was enough space to walk in, enough space to put a table in if we wanted. Buff paced the small gap. He flapped his arms in and out as if doing the chicken dance.

“See, bro,” he said. “In case we have parties.”

I sat down on the bed. I sank down to the gravel. I forgot about the pee stains on the other side. The whole room took on the sweet smell of the dirty mattress. I leaned back and rested my head against the wall, our wall. Along the opposite side, sunlight piped in through cracks and nail holes in the planks. The wall looked like what I thought a nighttime sky in the country might look like, busy, crowded. I searched for constellations, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, ones I’d heard about in school. I closed my eyes.

“This is awesome, bro,” Buff said.

“Yes,” I said. “Awesome.”

The fantasy lasted three days. Each night I was the one who called “time” and said we had to go. Each night got longer. I’m afraid of what might have happened had Buff never thrown that rock, the one that brought everything down. We were so close already, another day and maybe we would’ve stayed forever. Maybe we would’ve disappeared, like I wanted to back then, when I was young. Of course, things never work out the way you want them to. And then all you do, the rest of your life, is dream about what would’ve happened, or could’ve happened, had you done what you wanted to do in the first place.

In his defense, that rock was probably the biggest the gravel roof had to offer. In his defense, we should’ve hurled that rock months earlier, when the summer had first started, when I first met Buff. In his defense, no rock had ever glanced off a windshield, not like that, and really, what an odd set of circumstances, to have that little girl rounding third base in the park across the street at just the right time for the rock to go sailing into her temple, breaking her little head open, sending her chest-first into the concrete, her feet kicking up behind her, one lone white shoe cartwheeling over her body, landing somewhere up near her head, which had already begun to spout blood.

I remember this all as individual events. In my mind I can freeze each frame. Like when Buff and I turned to look at each other. Like when I saw Buff, not smiling but somehow shrugging, like he’d known this was going to happen, like he’d known something was going to happen to spoil everything.

They hadn’t even seen us yet, the family of the little girl, the gangbangers across the street. They hadn’t even called out like I remember them doing, “Hey, up there! Look, there they are! There’s those little fuckers!” None of this had even happened yet when Buff turned to me and said, “Sorry.” I wonder what he saw in my face. I wonder if he knew it wasn’t just his fault, that we were accomplices, friends.

In another moment the gangbangers were on the roof. I was punched in the stomach hard enough to make my back ache.

“Who threw the rock?” one of them asked me.

I looked to Buff. “Me,” he said. I am aware now that the noble thing would’ve been for me to say that I had done it, that I had thrown the rock. And I can see the nobility in Buff speaking up — even though he had done it, he didn’t have to say he had done it. At the time, though, the thought of taking the blame didn’t even cross my mind. I just watched one of the gangbangers approach Buff and without any warning, a windup, a step, a twist of the body, punch Buff square in the side of the face.

Buff didn’t make a sound. His knees buckled. He looked down. The side of his face was red. But he didn’t whimper or cry. When the kid who punched Buff turned, I saw that it was Junebug, the kid Buff had claimed was his cousin, the ugly kid.

They tore our house apart. They kicked in the flimsy walls. I hadn’t realized how weak the structure actually was. We’d sat in the house during rain, but we’d never have survived any kind of strong wind. It was only a matter of time.

I was dragged across the roof, handed down the air-conditioning ducts. Once on the ground I heard sirens, saw the flashing lights of ambulances and fire trucks. Police officers were pulling up. They saw Buff and me being led down the street in opposite directions. They saw that we’d been roughed over, beaten. They didn’t stop any of the gangbangers to ask questions. We were on our own then, and for a split second I had a flashback to when Buff had first suggested that we could build a house, a flashback to when I’d first called up to Buff, “Hey, how’d you get up there?” And, as I was presented to my father and yanked by my collar into the house, I longed for that feeling again. The feeling that I was all alone, that I was entirely free.

I’ve had other moments, since then. When I graduated college, for about five seconds I felt free. Or when I rode my first motorcycle down the alley behind my house, for about ten seconds I felt free. Then I realized I had to turn. But up there on the roof, when I was alone with Buff, I knew it, that it was all us; our lives were what we made of them. Never again have I felt as free as I did then.

Years after the pierogi factory incident I heard that Buff had been shot dead. This was in high school, my sophomore year. I was hanging out with friends in Barrett Park, where we played ball and drank beer. Ramiro said it. He always had the neighborhood news: “Hey, did you guys hear Buffster from the Latin Counts got killed? A drive-by, bro, right there on Wood Street. Got blasted in the head. Dead on arrival.”

“You mean bald-headed Buff?” I asked. “Short guy, blue eyes?”

“Yeah,” Ramiro said. “You knew him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We grew up together.”

“No you didn’t, bullshitter,” Alex, another in our group, said.

“No, I did,” I told them. “One summer me and him, we built a house. Over there on top of the old pierogi factory. You should’ve seen it. We were going to live there.”