CHAPTER 9

SIMON

THEY KILLED SY over a stereo. Sounds petty, I know. It was.

This gang called the PG3s sprouted up a few blocks north of us around Granville and Clark. They mainly hung out around Hayt Elementary School’s playground, which had this big asphalt baseball diamond with one of those pitched-roof field houses in the corner. The park was encircled by a tall chain-link fence. They were a mixed bag—whites, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and black’s. They were mostly teenagers; there were no real old-school heads ‘cause they just didn’t have any history. They were renegades, meaning they didn’t take sides in the huge rift between street gangs in Chicago known as the Nations. Back then, nearly all the individual gangs in the city fell under alliance with either the Folks Nation or the Peoples Nation. Endless wars raged between them. Being on your own like that in a big city is a difficult thing. It makes you an easy target for both sides, and as result, in the few years of their existence, the PG3s had become pretty ruthless.

One of the big problems with not being part of a Nation was the lack of access to quality drugs. The heroin and cocaine the PG3s did get a hold of was stomped on vigorously, so by the time they tried to bag it and sell it, even hungriest junkies and crackheads were sticking their noses up at it.

Even their weed was bunk.

Sy had gotten hold of a quarter-pound of kind bud from some Outlaws—this big biker crew from McCook out in the suburbs. Like I said, Sy just knew everybody. He worked part-time at a record store and sold the bud to help pay rent. He’d moved into this little second-floor apartment across from the hospital on Hollywood.

I witnessed the whole thing go down in stages, but nothing could have told me what was coming. It was like watching a bad car wreck in slow motion when the only thing you should do, you can’t, which is close your eyes.

•

WHEN I WAS A KID, Andersonville was only considered the shopping district—that strip of Swedish shops along Clark before it hit Ashland. What solidified this for me and all the rest of us was the Edgewater Hospital, which sat at Ashland and Hollywood. It was this towering tan concrete structure that loomed high and wide like a monolith. You could see it from just about anywhere in our little nook of Edgewater. It had an eerie omnipresence, like it was following us. Just above the pitched roofs and between the narrow gangways, there it was, always. We’d all been in that ER at least once with broken bones, cuts that needed stitches, and worse. Many of us had been born there, and more than a few of our relatives had died inside those ominous, concrete walls. The raw, divergent power of that monolith drew us kids like a magnet.

We’d started hanging out at the window sills along the Hollywood side of the hospital. It was something to do, and you could always expect to find somebody hanging out there. Plus, we had benches to sit on. Well, not exactly benches; they were the ledges of these deep-cut windows built right into the concrete wall of the hospital like rectangular vaults that were deep enough that you could fit in four 12-year-old kids sitting Indian style. They were tall, too. Real tall—like ten feet—so if you were standing in one, you couldn’t jump and touch the top. The windows were for the accounting offices, so the lights in ’em were out by six or seven at night, and the older guys would curl up in there with a girl to make out, or at least that’s what they were constantly bragging about. We were always graffiti’n the inside walls of the sills with markers. They rarely cleaned ’em ’cause you really couldn’t see anything unless you stuck your head inside. There were illustrations of strange sexual acts involving men, women, dogs, gorillas, and horses. The drawings were accompanied by silly taglines inside bubbles that read, “Giddy up!” “Give it to me, ya big ape,” or “Take it, Bitch!”

Then, there were random curse words, people’s nicknames, a big pot leaf, Metallica Ride the Lightning, and stuff like “Sue+Angel” with a heart around it. You could spend a whole afternoon just reading the crap the kids had written in all three of the sills. And just when it got cluttered enough and we were running out of space, the city’s graffiti blaster’d come in, put some padding on the glass, sandblast it all clean and fresh, and we’d get to start all over again.

The other part about hanging out at the sills that made it fun was that on weekend nights (and pretty much any night) there’d be a steady flow of ambulances. And depending on if the huge black security guard we called Big James was on duty or in a good mood, we got to walk up and get a little peek at the patients coming in. Sometimes, it was old people that just had a stroke or something, but other times, it was car accidents or violence. We saw a lot of nasty crap in that emergency room tunnel. It burrowed through the width of the hospital, paralleling Ashland and continuing to the arterial alley. Looking back now, I can’t believe they let us kids lurk around like that, but I guess they couldn’t ’a stopped us even if they’d tried, though Big James would run us off sometimes when we got too boisterous and annoying. I guess you could say that it was a sick thing to do, and that if our parents knew what we were doing, they’d have beat the crap outta us. What if the ambulances brought in someone we loved? We wouldn’t be wisecracking and ogling the ER patients then, and you’d be right. But kids just don’t think like that. What drew us was the same reason people watch reality shows today, or “ER” for Christ’s sake: people love realistic drama. Strangely enough, it’s a way of readying us for the inevitability of our own tragedies, our loved ones’ deaths, and our own. So maybe it ain’t so sick after all. We’re all curious, right? And we all know sooner or later, it’s coming.

It was a little different for Ryan and I than for the others. The Assyrian’s dead soul still haunted us. We dreamt of him and of the gore of that night years past, and I think we sought to find a control over our emotions surrounding death and the horrific to fortify our nerves and deaden our hearts to the torment we knew laid ahead.

•

THE FIRST TIME I SAW A PG3, I was down at the sills a couple years after Lil Pat got locked up. Ryan, Angel, and I had become an inseparable clique. My silent connection with Ryan was still strong; witnessing that together at such a young age and losing people to long-term lockups like we had had bound us tight. But getting to know Angel more and more—his weird, perverse sense of humor and his sly way of picking at people—just had me laughing incessantly. Those two were kind of a yin and yang for me: the hard, serious Ryan, and the goofy prankster Angel. We were just punk-ass 12-year-olds trying to find our sense of style. Still ain’t even hit puberty and stuck between being little boys and mean teens. Even though we’d seen more than most, we were still playing video games and watching cartoons. We were still liable to fall into a game of tag or hide and go seek with the younger kids, get caught by one another and frozen into rigid embarrassment, and then spend the rest of the day scowling and puffing cigarettes to prove how cold and tough we were, going on about all the guys we’d whooped on and all the girlfriends we had in other neighborhoods. We’d be sitting there at the sills breaking down all the TJO lit we knew. Which gangs were Peoples and which were Folks, and just listing off all the white gangs: Popes, Jousters, Gaylords, Royals.

“Man, fuck the Royals!” Ryan sneered. “They’re Folks.”

“You said white Stone Greaser gangs,” I replied, looking at him confused.

“Yeah, but fuck the Royals. My old man got shot by a Royal. I don’t wanta ever hear anybody talkin’ bout Royals around me.”

“Man, that’s stupid,” Angel whined, flashing teeth. “What about the Kansas City Royals? What, we can’t talk about them?”

“Yeah, fuck Bo Jackson. That bitch is a Royal!” I spat. Angel and I giggled.

“Fuck you,” Ryan snarled. “You know what I mean.” His face reddened, and his eyebrows trembled.

We let that simmer as we sat on the ledges in wait of something. The yellow streetlights cast dark shadows in the depths of the deep-cut sills like empty bank vaults. Traffic was thick and fast on Ashland, and low heavy metal oozed out of Sy’s window across the street. Mike Thompson slouched against the wall beside us. He’d turned into a 13-year-old pothead well on his way to becoming a burn-out. His stuck-up ass mom must have been so proud. He wore these weird pants that were really big and had no shape or taper at the ankle, and the legs looked like two fat, brown sewer pipes. Ryan and I passed a smoke back and forth from adjacent sills. Iron Maiden’s rambling clicked off across the street, and a few seconds later, Sy pattered down his front stairs in white gym shoes, jungle-camo pants, and a graying Metallica t-shirt. He strolled across to us. His ragged, dirty-blond hair mopped along his shoulders.

“Thought you said ya never was gonna smoke?” Sy said, grimacing, then he rushed me.

I leapt and dashed away. He swooped up quick. I stopped and cowered against the hospital wall and folded my arms over my head feebly. Sy smacked me, but my hand and wrist deflected it.

“I’m gonna do this every time I catch ya wit’ a cigarette,” he said, turning away. I unfurled my guard. He suddenly spun back, crouched, and slammed his fist into my thigh. The deep boom sent a chorus of “Ohhhhh!” out of everyone in earshot, then they settled into an uneasy laughter.

“Damn, Sy!” I said, hopping around on one leg. It felt like a heart pulsing there mid-thigh.

I limped to my ledge and sat back down. Grimacing, I kneaded the deep knot. Ryan tried to pass me the cigarette as he smirked up at Sy.

“No. Fuck no. I seen the light! I quit!” I said.

Sy grinned and slid his thin fingers through my hair, then snatched the cigarette from Ryan and took my pull.

“Aye, Sy, where’d you get that pot from?” Mike Thompson asked, whipping his hair out of his face. “That shit blew my fuckin’ mind!”

“Don’t worry about where I got it. Just remember where you got it.” Sy patted his chest right on the empty electric chair with the lightning shooting through it.

An ambulance swung into the ER tunnel with its lights swirling, but no siren. A few of us walked over to see. The paramedics rolled an old lady out on a stretcher. She was unconscious, sucking air through some plastic tubes that ran into her nostrils. A green oxygen tank lay beside her on the sheets.

“Dmm Dmm Dmm, Dm Da Dmm, Dm Da Dmm.” Angel hummed the Darth Vader theme as she eased past us. “Pshh, Luke… I am your grandmother,” he bellowed. We roared and loped out of the tunnel.

Sy sat in a sill smoking the cigarette he nicked off Ryan and I. He glanced at me disappointedly as we approached, silencing my laughter.

“You guys oughta stop doing that shit,” he said, squelching his smoke on the concrete shelf beside him. “What if that was your Gramma? Huh?” He glared at me, his brown eyes somber. I looked away and thought about Da, who was only dead a couple years by then. “What if it was one ’a your parents? Hell, what if it was one ’a you? What if it was me for Christ’s sake? You think I’d want to hear you little knuckleheads wisecracking about what happened to me?”

“Naw,” I said looking down. My throat tightened. “You’re right.”

Sy had a way of seeing things—a way of putting ’em to words, too. He was a songwriter, but he coulda been a poet, coulda been a lot of things. There’s been a few times in my life where people have told me things out of the blue, or in the midst of doing heavy drugs and drinking. They’d just come out of the fog for a second of clarity and give me something, like a going away present, but backwards. Like they were giving me something while they still had the time, like they knew it was coming and soon. Like a premonition. Like they were telling me exactly what I needed to know before they were gone forever.

“Check this out,” Ryan said, nodding down the street.

Four hoods rounded the corner at Ashland. One was a Puerto Rican with a fat head and a cheesy smile. Gold flickered in his ear lobe. There were two other thinner Puerto Ricans, too. One wore a Sox cap, and the other had crazy zigzag graphics cut into the sides of his trimmed, black hair. The last one was a skinny little black dude. His big white t-shirt hung off his narrow frame like a blanket and drooped over his baggy black sweatpants. He had a small head, and his eyes were big and wide open like he was on the absolute edge of committing total mayhem. If I’d a seen a similar guy today, I’d have instantly recognized him as a shooter for whatever gang he ran with. In other words, the go-to-guy when it was time to pop someone. But right then, I just thought he was crazy. Such a little guy, Sy coulda whooped his ass easy. This dangly dude looked like he was ready to whoop any man on the planet, but with the heat he probably had stuffed in his pocket, or snug in his waistband, he coulda.

“What up, Heffey?” Sy said as he walked up and greeted them with handshakes.

“What’s up, Simon,” the fat one said, grinning and sticking his chest out. His belly swelled against his red Scottie Pippen jersey.

The one with the hat pulled on his brim and asked, “We gonna handle this?”

“Yeah,” Sy said. “Just step into my office.” He led them across the street toward his place.

“Ay, can I play this on that stereo ’a yours? I just want to see what it sound like?” The one with the zigzag graphics pinched the corner of this clear mix-tape and brandished it.

I stared at the black kid. Who the fuck’s he think he is? They made their way up the steps, and when he reached the top, the black kid stopped, turned, and shot me a glance. His eyes were yellow and hollow like a black cat. No trace of emotion in his face. No trace of life—like some kinda monster. They filed inside, and a few minutes later, hip hop blasted from Sy’s open window like a sin.

•

IN THE STREET, if you can’t protect yourself, eventually you will be exposed and victimized. It didn’t take long for them PG3s to show their true colors. A couple days later, Angel, Ryan, and me we were out there at the sills as usual. The air was cool and dank. The streetlight above the sills flickered with a tick, like one of those bug zappers. Its audible, electric pulse expanded down to the sidewalk. I wondered how it worked. The sun was a ball of fire, but how did we make light bulbs work? Was there fire in there, too? Maybe it was just electricity, and maybe that’s what the sun was: just a big ball of electricity.

Sy sat in a sill with his feet on the ledge, hugging his knees to his chest. His hair flopped down, masking his face. He was silent, so we were silent with him. We even ran off some little kids that were making a racket. Rich and a few metal-heads came up from the corner store gripping glass liter bottles in brown paper bags; it was amazing how easy it was for teens to buy booze in the neighborhood back then. Then, I recognized this tall black one with a spiked mohawk—the guy from Fautches that the skinheads stabbed.

“I remember you,” the black guy said in a weird, almost British accent similar to the Ethiopians along Broadway and Granville.

“I remember when you got stabbed,” I said.

“This,” he pulled his shirt up and revealed a three-inch scar on his stomach, “was nothing.” He smiled. “If you only knew how much pussy a scar like this could get you, kid….”

Rich burst out laughing, then sauntered over to Sy.

“What’s da matter witchu, fucker?” Rich said, smirking down at Sy. “You look like somebody died.”

Sy raised his head, and his hair spliced back and revealed this terrible grimace strung across his burly mug.

“Those fuckin’ gangbangers broke in while I was at work. They stole my stereo and part of my stash.” Sy spit; it arced out and splattered foamy-white on the concrete.

“Ahh shit!” Rich squealed, stupefied.

“Motherfuckers!” the black guy shot back.

“We’re gonna get those motherfuckers,” Sy said, flinging out of his sill at Rich. They squared and gazed fiercely in each other’s eyes.

“What’s a gangbanger?” I asked, looking up at Rich. I’d never heard it said like that. Usually, it was gangster, or by name like a King or a TJO.

“They fuckin’ stand on the corner lookin’ tough, and then hide behind guns and numbers! They’re fuckin’ cowards! They’re nothing but a bunch of niggers and spicks,” Rich said, shooting his crazed eyes at mine. Spittle sprayed from his lips.

“Quit saying ’nigger,’” I said. I looked at the black guy.

“What? Joseph?” Rich nudged the black guy. “Joseph ain’t a nigger, he’s Ghanaian. Joseph hates niggers more than me!”

“They’re not Africans,” Joseph sneered. “They’re slaves with slave mentalities.”

Rich chortled and leaned his face right in close on Sy’s. “Let’s go up there right now and bust some fuckin’ heads.”

“Hell yeah,” Sy bellowed.

“Let’s go,” Joseph urged.

“Come on, motherfucker, you scared?” Rich asked, shoving Sy in the chest. They tore off toward Ashland hooting, hollering, and squealing like swine.

I’d have been worried if I’d heard Lil Pat talking that way, but since it was Rich, I just laughed it off. He wasn’t known for being all that tough with guys his own age and size.

“Man, you think they’re gonna get ’em?” Angel asked.

“Naw, they’ll probably get beat up or somethin’,” I retorted.

“Yeah, but maybe Sy though,” Ryan added, arching his red eyebrows. “He’s pretty mad.”

“Look what I got.” Angel held up a bag. It was small and had green leaves and light-brown stems and a bunch of little, round seeds in it. I scrunched my nose as the pungent aroma struck my nostrils.

“It’s weed, man,” Angel said, disappointed.

“How we gonna smoke it?” Ryan asked.

“Man, give me a cigarette,” Angel said.

Ryan pulled out a Marlboro Light from a tattered Camel pack with an assortment of different-colored butts sticking out. Angel took one and sat down. He crumbled the end in his fingers so about half the tobacco poured out on the ledge of concrete beside him, and we blocked the view from the street with our backs. Ryan took the bag of weed and plucked some of the buds out, then he crumbled ’em into a pile of thin dust next to the stringy lump of tobacco. Then, Angel pinched the green dust in his index and thumb, held the cigarette vertically, and sprinkled it into the hollow end. He filled an inch of the cigarette, then squeezed the paper and twisted it tight. He pulled out his lighter and leaned back. Then, he tilted the cigarette upward, lit it, and puffed hard a few times.

The shit smelled nasty as it swirled up in Angel’s eyes. He blew out a small, gray cloud in my face, and passed to Ryan, who puffed and coughed instantly. Angel and I laughed and called him a pussy, then Ryan handed it to me. Maybe it was the nerves or something, but I took a sharp, deep pull and exhaled a huge plume of smoke. This damp, sticky, burning sensation snaked down through my windpipe and into my lungs. Once there, it expanded and twisted into my bronchial tubes like tree roots. I remember seeing Angel’s and Ryan’s eyes swell wide open. Then, I hunched over and retched, trying to expel the hot liquid, but the only thing that came up was a clear line of drool that dangled down to the sidewalk. It felt like there was molten ooze slithering around inside me. Finally, I recovered and stood up straight. It was like someone had socked me a good one. There were stars. Not the cartoon stars, but real stars, like a thousand tiny dots, flickering over everything. I looked at Angel’s laughing face, and his mouth morphed into this giant cave. His big teeth were glossy, wet, and bright. Deep inside the cave, his tiny pink flagella danced and flapped back and forth. Suddenly, it grew eyes. I shuddered and looked away. Ryan sucked hard on the cigarette with his face all tied up in a knot, then the gray smoke poured from his mouth like steam.

My heart thrummed. I was suddenly winded, exhausted, and cold, so I climbed into a sill. My whole being quivered and then crawled up inside my skull. I heard my own thoughts loud in my cranium, and it felt like I could hear everyone else’s thoughts, too. First, I heard their words, then their thoughts trailing afterward. They both seemed very far away. Their smiles began to distort into grotesque, elongated masks. They kept trying to hand me the white smoke. The dark-orange ember smoldered audibly. Then, everything went back to normal—time was normal, sound normal, sight normal. Ryan leaned in close and looked at me. I batted my eyes and braced for the next hallucination.

“This motherfucker is fucked up!” Ryan said in awe. I didn’t respond. I was scared. What if I stay like this forever? Then, it all started again. Everything slowly distorted. My thoughts grew loud. Time stretched.

Suddenly, I heard this familiar voice and turned. Monteff stood at the mouth of the tunnel in some white jeans. The pleats and creases in the jeans created these mountainous glacier legs that flowed down to his Reebok Pumps. He’d said something funny that I didn’t catch. They laughed. Monteff’s small, bright-white teeth flashed and sent these spiral rays shooting in all directions. He walked up and greeted us with handshakes and toked on the weed smoke.

Monteff was one of the only black dudes from the Dead-End-Docks who would come over by us to chill. He was just one of those vibrant individuals who can transcend race and cliques and haters. He’d surpass those invisible walls and bring his joyful, melodic vibe along with him. But even he was freaking me out in the state I was in. Monteff always arched his eyebrows up when he was listening to something entertaining. Angel was on one of his perverse, sarcastic ramblings, and it sent Monteff’s eyebrows stretching up higher and higher. Suddenly, they morphed into the shape of the McDonald’s Arches. Then, the tips of his bristly eyebrows melded into the hairline of his trimmed scalp. I was so gripped by it that I couldn’t catch what Angel was saying. Angel’s voice erupted loudly, then twisted into a chortle. Monteff’s eyebrows swelled to form his soft widow’s peak, and his eyeballs yawned wide open and protruded out of their sockets. The light-brown flecks caught in the arc lamp. Man, I really should never smoke weed, especially not kind bud.

Later, an ambulance roared into the emergency room tunnel. The red-and-blue strobe lit the whole block and struck the full-leaved trees across the street, daylight-bright. A pair of gleaming, phosphorescent-white eyes flashed at me through the leafy branches, then vanished. Angel, Ryan, and Monteff jogged into the alley and up to the ER ramp. I followed, sluggishly.

The ambulance doors burst open. Urgency distorted the faces of the paramedics. It looked like they were all screaming soundlessly. Then, I realized it was the deafening sirens that were screaming.

“Damn, that motherfucker got his ass whooped,” Ryan said. A sickness had taken him. Saliva drenched his lips. HIs grimace suddenly elongated until the corners of his lips touched his ears. His crooked teeth wiggled, then suddenly everything warped back to normal. Monteff gawked, then spun away saying, “Ohhhhhhh!” His mouth stretched in a downward “o” like an anteater’s snout.

I looked at the guy as the stretcher descended from the ambulance. He was an unconscious, teenaged Puerto Rican kid, and the side of his face and head were terribly swollen and pulsing red. There was a large gash that hung open like a flap and ran along the back of his skull with dark blood leaking from it. There were crazy, zigzagging lines etched into his scalp that ran down behind his ears, and I recognized the face, but couldn’t figure out where from. Then, it hit me: he was one of the dudes that stopped by to listen to Sy’s stereo.

Years later, Rich’d tell me how they’d gotten that guy. We were riding to work in the big box truck he drove for the construction company. Mancow’s Morning Madhouse had enraged him, so he’d shut the radio off. They’d run up into the PG3s’ turf that night and saw Mr. Zigzag walk into a corner store. They waited for him along the wall on the dark side street. When he came out with a big plastic bottle of Diet Coke in his hands, Rich’d stepped up behind him. Then Rich smashed his full glass liter of Budweiser over the back of Mr. Zigzag’s head with the brown paper still wrapped around it. They lumped him up a little when he went down, face-flat on the sidewalk. Then, they jetted the fuck outta there before anybody saw ’em.

•

SY HAD A GIRLFRIEND over that way, right off of Granville. That’s how he met them PG3s when they got word he had some flame bud. Sy went over to see his girl that Friday. Word was out that somebody’d burglarized Sy’s place, and that he was sure it was the PG3s who’d done it. The stereo meant a lot to Sy. Music was a big part of his identity. It was his escape from all the trouble he had at home. And he’d saved up a long time to get it. The PG3s didn’t like Sy slandering their names in the street like that, and they had their suspicions of who rode on their boy with the zigzag ’do, so when one of ’em saw that Sy had stopped by his girl’s house, they sent over their shooter—that same little black kid I saw a few days before. Dude went by the name of Spider. They sent him to stick a gun in Sy’s face and tell him to quit with his talking.

When Sy left his girl’s place, Spider stepped up to him and pulled the 9mm revolver. He held it at his side, just to show him, and told Sy to keep the PG3s out of his vocabulary. Sy had a certain way of seeing things, so he probably looked at that 15-year-old kid and thought Screw all this crap. Probably wanted to talk to him, talk some sense into him. Sy reached for the gun, and Spider lurched back, scared. Pop.

That same night, Angel, Ryan, and I were down there hangin’ as usual. Friday night was always a big night—a lot of domestics, car accidents, muggings, knifings, old people off their meds and having strokes and breakdowns. I was sitting on the ledge of my sill, elbows propped on my knees, feeling strange. Sewage rambled below the street and echoed up through the catch-basin along the curb. Angel was next to me chomping on a wad of Gonzo Grape Bubblicious and blowing quick, little bubbles that popped and squished. The noise irritated all the tiny hairs inside my earlobe. Angel could annoy a person like no other. I felt sick and dizzy and a little scared as the full, incandescent moon beamed down on us through the hazy, purplish sky.

“Man, I got a weird feeling about tonight, man,” I said, folding my arms over my chest.

“Yeah?” Angel replied, furrowing his brow as he continued to pop away.

“Yeah. Something crazy is gonna happen, man. I can just feel it in my stomach, ya know?”

“What, like that shit—what do they call it—ESB or somethin’?” Ryan said giggling, as he leaned against the narrow concrete partition between the sills.

“Man, I don’t know,” I said, then licked my dry lips. “I just want to see if it works. That’s why I told you. What if I’m fucking psychic or something?”

Angel chortled. “Well, tell me what I’m thinking then.”

“Ah, either some kinda joke with hermaphrodites in it, or about fucking one ’a those big-booty bitches in the Lowrider magazines.” I grinned widely at him.

“Shit! He is psychic! Fuck! Watch out what you think around him, Ry. You know, about kissing him and shit like that, ’cause he’ll catch your ass.”

“Fuck you, you fucking weirdo,” Ryan said, flat and cool.

An ambulance strolled slowly through the back way with its lights on swirling lazily, but without sirens. We jogged into the alley. The ambulance drivers helped an old bald man out of the back by his arm. His mouth hung open, and his light-blue eyes were lost. He wore red-striped pajamas with a big wet spot at the crotch.

“Aye, look, he pissed his self!” Angel sighed.

“Man, that old fucker’s retarded. Look at him,” Ryan said.

“I pissed my pants?” the old man said, bewildered. His mouth gaped, revealing his blackened bottom row of teeth.

“Man, we better stop. Big James is gonna come out here, man,” I said as we walked back.

“I pissed my pants?” Angel mimicked the old man perfectly. “That’s nothing. I shit myself, too!” Angel cocked his head to the side with his crazy eyes wide open and his bottom lip uncurled.

We were still giggling when the sirens of another ambulance blared onto Hollywood.

“Told you it was gonna be a crazy night,” I said. We waited at the mouth of the tunnel.

The ambulance came in hot. Its tires squealed as it rounded the corner, then zoomed into the tunnel. An excitement rushed up, then froze like icicles in my stomach.

The ambulance came to a screeching halt. The driver lunged out, and the one in back leapt down from the back doors. They extracted the stretcher swiftly. Their faces were fierce and panic-stricken. A young doctor jogged down the ER ramp as we stepped up. Big James emerged. I couldn’t see at first because of the commotion. Big James pushed us back in his slow, powerful way with the back of his arm. Angel squeezed up in front.

“Ahhhh, dat guy’s dead!” Angel said in a silly voice. “Look at him, his brains are leaking out.” He turned and walked away with a sick smile. “Yeah, we got a 109: oil leak out of skull.” He spoke into an invisible radio attached to his shirt collar.

I chuckled uneasily as I fought my way up to see, and then I saw the face, the beard all wet and dark. The red-soaked hair had familiar, greasy, dirty-blond strands at the edges. The mangled face had dark-red blood smeared all over it. My heart jumped along with my entire body. I turned to run, then turned back to look again. The long hair, the beard, tufts of sinew protruded from the gaping wound in the eye socket. There was blood and a darker, thicker mucus oozing up like tar. I muffled a scream with my palm, spun, and sprinted away. I could hear the ambulance driver speaking with the ER doctor as they pushed him up the ramp: “One round through the left orbital. No exit.”

“Oh, shit,” Ryan yelled. “Dude got shot in the head!”

I ran as fast as I could. A thousand things soared through my head. I ran home. When I got inside, I bounded stairs to Rich’s room and tried the doorknob. It was locked. I banged hard and fast on the thin, hollow wood. The sound thundered over the heavy metal music blaring inside.

“Rich!” I screamed. “Rich!” The emotion poured in a squealing sway.

The door ripped open.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Rich said, glaring down at me.

“It’s Sy!”

“What?”

“It’s Simon!” I hugged him around his waist for some reason.

“What?” Rich gripped my shoulders and yanked me away. “Tell me what’s going on dammit!”

“The ambulance, he…”

“What? At the hospital?” Rich jumped, his eyes wide open. He turned towards his room, then bounded out the door past me.

“They—they—brought him in,” I said, following him.

Rich stormed down the stairs and out the front door. I followed. He sprinted up the street. The realization that Sy would die sunk into my lungs like two hooks. Wires looped around my arms and legs and bogged me down until I couldn’t run. It felt like something’d broken inside my chest. I sobbed and tried to expel the broken thing—to scream it out. I retched, gagged, and vomited air. Then, I steadied and forced myself to walk toward the hospital. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. I was sure Sy was dead, but then these little sparks of hope started popping inside me, and I thought maybe he’d make it, and I ran again even though the wires tangled me. When I got to the hospital, I gusted past Ryan and Angel at the sills. They looked shocked at having just seen Rich sprint past.

“What’s going on, Joe?” Angel said solemnly.

I rushed down the tunnel and sprang through the ER door. Big James snagged me by my collar. “Hold on now, kid, you can’t go in there.”

I could see Rich down a white corridor talking with a blond doctor. The doctor adjusted his spectacles and said something in a calm, flat tone. A great thing plucked out of Rich in that instant. He crumbled to his knees—clutching his stomach. Silence, then a throttling scream resonated throughout the room. Tears washed down my face as Big James held me there by my arms. The doctor stepped away, and Rich rocked on the floor in the hallway. Beyond him, there was a commotion behind a tall curtain. Doctors and nurses cut in and out of it. Then, the curtain split open. They looked like ants climbing on each other. It yanked shut. Big James spun me and crouched down.

“Why don’tchu go home and get somebody,” he said somberly.

When I passed the sills, Angel jogged up beside me.“What’s going on? Did you know that guy or something?” he asked.

“That was Sy, man,” I answered, staring straight ahead.

“What?” Angel said, repulsed. “No it wasn’t.”

“It was Simon,” I said in a cold tone. “He’s dying.”

Ryan grabbed Angel’s shoulder, and they stopped. I just kept on towards the house. Angel started to say something, but Ryan stopped him. A Medivac helicopter thromped across the sky overhead and disappeared above the leering hospital walls.

“I thought it might be him,” Ryan said.

“Oh my God,” Angel replied as I fell out of earshot. I went home and told my parents.

When I fell to my knees and prayed that night, it was different than when I’d prayed for the Assyrian. I prayed with a bright and unstoppable hope that Sy would survive and make it and live for a very long time. The hope was so powerful that joyful tears streamed down my face as I imagined Sy walking out of the hospital into the golden sunlight weeks later with an eye patch, smiling; his long, dirty-blond hair draped down over his shoulders.

•

THEY MEDIVAC’D SY to Weiss Memorial Hospital in Uptown, and he made it through the night, but he was on life support and slipped into a deep coma by the next day. The doctors weren’t giving him much chance at living, but he was holding on. They put him in their coma ward, but it was all for nothing. They pulled the plug a week later.

After the funeral, Rich went nuts. One day, I was sitting on the porch and Rich and this crazy looking Mexican dude barreled past and inside the house. A few seconds later, they ran out with a bed sheet covering Rich’s 12-gauge shotgun. Rich laughed and put his finger to his lips, shushing me as he passed. I stayed quiet, though at night, my mind raced with all the wonder of the war my brother was fighting as shots rang out in the neighborhood. Rich’d teamed up with the Latin Kings from the set right there on the other side of Clark. They started pulling drive-bys at Hayt Elementary School’s playground where, on any given night, you could find thirty or more PG3s lounging along the high fence near the fieldhouse.

Rich told me, years later, how he and Shorty and a few other Kings shot them up almost constantly for months. How the Kings taught him to roll up a main drag, an arterial street, and turn onto a one-way. Do your deed—quick, without words—before they could run or get to their heat. Then, you speed off into the maze of side streets—the capillaries of the city. Get out of that neighborhood, preferably into a worse neighborhood like Rogers Park or Little Vietnam, so if the truck was I.D.’d that precinct wasn’t on your shit. They’d have their own crap to deal with. Park the truck near the Red Line, take it to the Bryn Mawr stop. Walk it home. Come back and get the truck the next morning.

Repeat.

Repeat until the shit was getting too redundant and crazy for even the Kings. Repeat until a shotgun slug finally finds someone dead-center, or a .25-round skips along the playground asphalt and tears flesh.

The PG3s began to recognize the big, brown Bronco. One day at Senn, Rich came out of school and every single window had been completely broken out, even the frickin’ rear-view mirrors. They sold the Diesel and bought a blue Dodge Ramcharger, and Rich transferred to a public school out on the Northwest Side.

But then, worst of all, Spider got off on self-defense ’cause Sy went for the gun. Can you imagine that? He walked after about two months—walked right out of juvie a free man. Rich saw him one night when he was rolling around near this little playground a half-block north of Senn. Spider was just sitting there on a swing with a Walkman in his lap and some headphones on—the big, padded ones with the input you could plug into a stereo outlet. He was just nodding away, maybe waiting for somebody, who knows. Rich didn’t have the .25 on him, or the shotgun, but he had a bat in the truck. Some gnarly, thick-stalked one that Lil Pat’d made in woodshop. Rich drove around the block and parked so he was behind Spider. He got out with the bat and walked up quick, light-footed, trying to be quiet atop the little brown woodchips of the playground. There was no one out. He hid the bat along his thigh as best he could and crept right up behind Spider, who was slowly rocking his head. Rich brought that heavy-stalked bat up over his own head like a two-fisted broadsword and—WAP!—came down directly atop Spider’s narrow cranium, cracked his skull, and ended his reign as the PG3s’ shooter.

Never did figure out if that’s how it really went down. There’re police records, I’m sure, and even people I coulda asked, but maybe part of me didn’t want to find out. Kinda hope that it ain’t how it went down, for Rich’s sake. That’d be a whole lot to carry around for the rest of your life, and he already had plenty to haul.