CHAPTER 23

NUCLEUS

THANKSGIVING WAS ALWAYS FUN—everybody together watching the game; a huge baked turkey jammed full of stuffing; yams, cheesy veggies, and sparkling grape juice; little Johnny running around playing. But inevitably, we got to talking politics around the dinner table after the meal.

And if it wasn’t enough with Blake being a cop and Rich a degenerate racist, Jan had gotten into black Studies at Northern Illinois, and some race-nutty ex-Panther professor took her under his wing. Jan had always been in search of her identity. It was there in her short temper, her prideful stubbornness. She just knew she wasn’t white. And in her search for what she was, she’d found a history that set her people against Anglos. Funny, though, how so many of us forget the Spanish were white imperialists and that Spaniards’ white blood traced its way through all of the Caribbean and Latin America. How the Spanish language has nothing to do with the Caribbean people, or the Mayans and Aztecs, either. I guess almost all of us have some white in them, and at the root, some black, too. But, to be honest, it was nice to see Rich’s and Blake’s crazy shit challenged. It didn’t take much to spark it up, and then they were off to the races, full-tilt.

“A racist system?” Blake said, squinting his eyes across the dining room table at Jan. “Where’s the racism? What, in Affirmative Action? Yeah, that’s definitely racist.”

“If it’s not a racist system, then why is it that 80 percent of Cook County Jail inmates are African American?” Jan’s eyes stretched wide-open, and she raised her short, pudgy hands, fingers spread.

“Well, I don’t know, probably because blacks commit 80 percent of the crime in the city?” Blake said, then glanced over to Rich, who burst out laughing. “I’m just taking a guess here, though.”

“It’s a racist system!” Jan yelled, then slapped her hands down hard on the white lace tablecloth. “How about racial profiling? That is a nationwide problem.”

“Listen, when I pull over a car with a young black guy driving it,” Blake said, placing his elbows on the table and leaning in toward Jan, “90 percent of the time, he doesn’t have insurance, he doesn’t have a license, he doesn’t have registration for the car, and when I run the VIN number, it comes up stolen.” He rocked back in his seat and shot his chin upward. “All a those are jailable offenses, and he’s whining about,” Blake sneered and cocked his head to the side, “’How you finna profilin’ me like dat, bra?’”

“That’s a load of bull-crap,” Jan replied, dismissing him with a wave.

“No. It’s fact, and it’s my daily life. And when I pull over a white person, not that there are all that many whites driving around in the hood…”

“Unless they’re there to buy drugs!” Jan added.

“That’s right. They’re there buying drugs, but when I pull ’em over, I got nothing on them. They got a driver’s license, proof of insurance, registration, and guess what? They’re polite when I walk up on ’em.”

“And you let ’em go,” Jan said, rocking back and raising her chin, satisfied. “Ahuh.”

“That’s right. I say, ’Have a nice day, and stay out of the hood. This is a dangerous place.’”

“And that’s fair? That’s law and order?”

“It’s this simple: locking up some suburban business man down there buying a bag of weed is a waste of my time.”

“It’s your job, Blake,” Jan retorted.

“No,” he said, shooting his index finger at her. “It’s not my job; my job is to get guns off the street, to get drugs off the street, and to get shit-bags off the street.” He shot his thumb southwest.

“And that’s gonna stop the problem? They’re impoverished people. They’ve got no other way of making money other than the drug trade,” Jan argued.

“Get a job at Mickey D’s! There’s plenty a warehouses on the Wes’ Side. They don’t want to earn a honest buck—it’s too hard.”

“No one will even hire you if you’re a felon!”

“Well, I don’t know about you,” Blake said, grinning at Rich, “but that sounds like a pretty good reason not to commit a felony, don’t ya think?” Rich choked on his sparkling grape juice.

“That’s just asinine,” Jan said, pushing away from the table. She grabbed her cloth napkin and threw it on her plate. “You’re an asshole, Blake.” She stomped out of the room.

“All I’m telling you is the truth, Janet,” Blake said, sitting back with a pompous smirk strung on his lips. “You just don’t want to hear it.”

I stayed out of it when I was still that young, but later I wouldn’t. It’s amazing—all the crazy debates we’ve had at the dinner table. Sometimes I don’t know how we all stuck together as long as we did.

•

THAT NIGHT, Jan and I were sitting at the dinner table having some chocolate cream pie. She was still steaming about the argument at dinner.

“Do you even know the history of civilization in Africa?” she asked me.

“What? Sure I do,” I said, smiling. “The Africans were running around in little tribes in the jungle until the whites came down and took it all over.”

“Oh, sure. That’s what you read in those Catholic school history books. See, they teach you what they want you to know, but not the truth. Did you know there was a civilization in Africa that had written language and one hundred percent literacy throughout its entire people? You didn’t know that, did you?”

“Naw,” I replied. “Well, are you talking about the Egyptians?”

“No,” she sighed. “See, that’s what every textbook says. ’The Egyptians, the Egyptians.’ Did you know there was an ancient civilization south of Egypt more advanced than the Egyptians, and the Egyptians came down and massacred them? Massacred them! You never heard that, did you?” She gobbled some chocolate pie with whipped cream.

“Nope,” I said. “Never heard that once.”

“And did you ever hear of the Moors?”

“Nope.”

“Of course you didn’t. Did you know that they built all of Spain? They brought technology, they brought everything there. They civilized that whole region.”

“So what happened to them?” I ate a forkful of the pie that’d melted some and turned to a creamy-brown, not far from Jan’s skin tone.

“They got massacred and pushed out of the country back to Africa. And the Greeks, too; they stole all their philosophy from Africa.” She waved her fork around like an instructor’s wand.

“Come on, Jan.” I gave her a sideways look.

“No, Joe, I’m telling you the truth. I mean, read a real history book for once—not that crap you get in American schools.”

“I never heard any of this shit,” I said, shrugging.

“Sure you didn’t. Did you know that, at the beginning of humanity, there were two peoples in Africa? Way back at the very beginning of mankind. One of those peoples became whites—they had straight hair and light skin; the other was the blacks. The whites were violent and evil, and the blacks went to war with them and ran them all the way out of the continent. The whites were the people who went to Europe and became Europeans and Germanics.”

The way she was talking was strange, but I sort of believed her. No one else but Blake went to college, and Blake never really talked with me much. For a minute, I actually believed her.

“Damn, I never heard any of this,” I said, shrugging.

“Yeah, you won’t either, ’til you get to college,” Jan said proudly.

“All they ever teach in high school is the Greeks, the Romans. Hmmm, they’re nothing compared to the civilizations in Africa, or the Mayans. Oh yeah, and Christopher Columbus—puhh, he didn’t discover America. The Africans were going there for centuries. Just look at the Mayan temples—they’re pyramids! I mean, it’s just common sense.”

I couldn’t really argue with her. She just had too many arguments, and they all seemed right, and she was so sure of them. I figured she must have got them from somewhere.

“I don’t know. I guess I gotta read some of your history books if I’m gonna be able to talk with you about this shit.”

It was funny; with Lil Pat and Blake gone, there wasn’t anyone around to ask about it. Dad wouldn’t really talk about stuff like that, so I was sort of stuck. But I didn’t really give a crap about any of that shit, anyway. I was too busy trying to keep from getting my neck stretched on the street. Plus, it was all messy. It seemed to me that history wasn’t really fact; it was all about how you saw it and who wrote the history books. Like, if I told a story about a fight I was in, I’d see it my way, whereas, whoever I was fighting with’d see it their way. The truth was probably somewhere in the middle.

It was still strange the way she was talking, and it weighed on me into the night. I stayed up thinking about it, wondering if Jan really believed all that stuff. If she thought all white people were evil—just born evil—and if she hated them. And if she hated me, too, just because I was white. I thought about it a lot and got angry—thought maybe blacks and whites were pitted against each other. But then, I thought of Monteff and Monica and how they were my friends. Then, I thought of Jan’n’Rose, and I knew he couldn’t hate any of them. I thought about the word ’nigger,’ and I knew Martin Luther King Jr. was a good man. I wondered what the word even meant. I didn’t know, and all the worrying about it just seemed stupid.

“Nigger, nigger, nigger,” I said quietly into the dark of my room. A grin stretched across my face. “Spick, chink, honky, sand nigger, dago, mick, polock, flake, pig, fag, dyke, whore, cocksucker, fat ass, bug eyes, big head.”

I kept thinking of different words until I couldn’t come up with anymore and just started laughing. That’s all they were—words. Stupid words that could never describe real people. I laughed so loud, I knew everyone could hear me, and I tried to stop, but it only made it worse. I bit my hand to stop until I was crying real tears and still giggling. Slowly, I drifted off to sleep and dreamt in color—bold and glowing color—all night.

They were good, fun dreams, and at one point, I realized I was dreaming and started desperately to think of things I could do. I found a hot chick and started kissing her and squeezing her breasts and ass. Then, that stopped, and I was inside a packed Aldi grocery store. Everyone was tired and pissed off. They were all mixed races and bickered in different languages, and there were huge lines that stretched far down the aisles. I was giddy and suddenly thought maybe I could fly. I concentrated real hard. Of course I could fly. I wanted to grow wings, and I felt them begin to bulge at my back, but before they could break the skin, I started to float upward. Everyone suddenly stopped arguing and turned to see me. I floated up and towards the door and popped outside. People out in the parking lot gawked as I ascended, rising slowly at an angled trajectory. Then, I looked downward and fell back toward the ground. I remembered I was dreaming and rose again. My whole body flexed, and I flew in a controlled way now. I flew high, and I could see all of the dream beneath me. It was so beautiful. There were these neon-green hills surrounding the store that joyfully and brightly glowed off-and-on and told me how happy they were. I was up in the clouds. The soft clouds bumped against me and shot out of sight. There was nothing up there. It got boring, so I floated back down to the Aldi parking lot, where all the people inside had flooded out to. They fought each other, and there was no order to the violence—it wasn’t even along racial lines. Pockets of people punched and kicked each other. Moms punched old ladies, kids jumped up and down on babies, a fat guy kicked another fat guy in the face. No one was really angry, either. They moved mechanically. I focused on them and descended diagonally. When they saw me, they looked up and got mad as hell. I smiled down and thought, you could fly, too, if you want. Somehow, my thought was transmitted telepathically to all of them, and they stopped, looked up, and got angrier. So I flicked them off saying ’Nigger, spick, chink, honky, fag, dike, sand nigger…” as I soared over their heads. Saying the words gave me more power to accelerate, and I flew like that for a long time until I woke up smiling, my body warm. I wanted to dream more but couldn’t fall back to sleep. Then, the warmth and the smile wore off in the reality of the day.

•

THE PG3 COBRAS weren’t through exacting their revenge. That weekend, we were sitting at the mouth of the alley beside St. Greg’s gymnasium. The parish was throwing some kind of Thanksgiving festival—God only knows what for. The lot across the street from us was inundated with a thick swarm of people, and in the center of it, the swing ride’s top spindle rim loomed above glowing neon-green and pink and orange. The chains hung down straight and bobbed some as the riders jostled in their chairs. The ride started to spin slowly, and the chains began to fan outward. The children swirled into a cyclone with their feet dangling sideways from the swing chairs as they gripped the taut chains. The glowing, circular rim of the ride slowly ascended, and the swings fanned out further, so they soared above the heads of the people speckled about on the blacktop. Then, it tilted to the side. The swings spread like the tentacles of some strange amoeba, and the riders squealed so loud it carried out over the building tops.

Ryan had his bike out. It creaked and yawned under him as he repositioned himself on the plastic banana seat. His ape hanger handlebars tilted down and out over the front white-wall tire, and red metallic-flake paint bubbled over the rust spots at the creases of the frame where he’d forgotten to sand them. But they were his mistakes and his ride, all the way. Ryan’s imbecilic smirk was irrepressible. He squinted and blinked, and his prideful eyes glowed wet. Lounging, he splayed his arms out on the long handlebars, and his Dago T drooped off his shoulders. His skin was red from the day’s long, slow cruise—we’d ridden all the way to Wrigley and back, and the pedestrians’d taken notice. A bum’d gawked at it for 15 minutes between sips on his cheap wine.

I watched the alley for any sign of a PG3, or any Flake really. The thick, slow crowd swayed side-to-side as they waddled, high on cotton candy and funnel cakes. Beyond them, the alley continued on, loping through the intersections. The hospital hung high above the neighborhood just two short blocks down. Suddenly, there was a squeal of tires.

“TJO KILLA!!! FLAKE KILLA!!! PG3 MOTHAFUCKA! COBRA LOVE!”

A flash of lights spilt across us, then the black Blazer careened into the alley. I snatched Ryan by the back of his neck and elbow and yanked him right off the bike. The front end of the Blazer lurched up and slammed down on the bike’s back tire, then it barreled over the frame. The front tire dislodged and bounced down the alley. Ryan and I fell against the red bricks of the gymnasium.

“Get the fuck out-de way, homes!” Heffey yelled as he stuck his big head out of the driver’s side window. An absurd grin spread across his lips, and he reeked of warm beer. The Blazer jolted to a stop.

The passenger’s side door flung open, and a mob of PG3s poured out. We broke towards home. We hit the busy alley and sliced through the thick crowd, dipping and dodging people the whole way. The PG3s shouted at our back. Finally, we broke through, and I darted blindly across Bryn Mawr without a glance for traffic. Ryan was never fast, but he booked so hard he broke from us. By the time Angel and me approached Olive, he’d already crossed it. Suddenly, the Blazer emerged and swerved on a diagonal across the mouth of the alley at Olive. It skidded to a stop as I cut around the front end, and Angel leapt up and slid across the black, rusted hood. He stumbled, and I slowed, then he got his footing, and we sprinted across the street into our alley. Ryan dashed to the abandoned garage and ducked down into the stash. I knew what he sought. A sense of relief washed over me, then it was swallowed again by the fear of those dozen pounding footsteps at my back.

Ryan rose from the stash. He gripped the .25 and slapped the clip in. Then, he stomped into the center of the alley. Angel rounded the corner and paused at the T in the alley. There was a sharp click as the slide barrel registered a round in the chamber. It rang clear over the patter of feet and halted the PG3 Cobras at the mouth of the alley. I stopped, panting, bobbing on my toes. I tried to make eye contact with Ryan, but he just looked down. His lips curled upward at the edges. Tears beaded down and dripped off his sunken chin, sparkling in the stark light. The PG3s shrunk into one glob and gripped at each other’s arms; I don’t know if it was to keep them together, or to hold their ground. Heffey barged through and emerged in front of them.

“Whatchu gonna do wit’ dat BB gun, weto?” he said as he raised his chin and puffed out his belly. The others laughed and bobbed on their toes, still gripping each other like they were walking through a haunted house.

I heard Ryan whisper, “This.”

He raised up the .25 and aimed, dead center, at the glob. He squeezed. It was a low pop, but in the darkness, the fire lit the narrow alley like a camera flash. Angel ducked around the corner at the T in the alley, and I dove between two large, black plastic garbage cans, then peaked over the top. The glob of PG3s dispersed instantly, and Heffey wobbled back to the Blazer. He reached under the seat and brandished a large-caliber black pistol. Ryan’s second shot rang out, somehow quieter. He kept a steady, crisp, upright pace. His face glistened wet with the .25 aimed, arm stretched chest-high. Heffey ducked down behind the half-open door and cocked his gun. Then, from a crouch, he raised up the barrel and squeezed off a shot. A deep crackling boom illuminated the alleyway. To my horror, Ryan sprinted straight towards Heffey, dead center in the alley. Another PG3 ran around the Blazer and dove into driver’s seat. Ryan’s third shot burst through the windshield, splintering the glass up high and making it look like an iceball disintegrated across its width.

“Damn,” Heffey said, trying to hide his fat belly behind the car door. Then, he raised his heavy piece and squeezed another round off from a crouch. Ryan’s fourth shot exploded through the window of the door Heffey hid behind. The glass gushed white, and the center descended as the edges clung like crystal drapes in the frame.

The driver threw it in gear as Heffey drug himself into the door. His feet scraped along the pavement as he gripped the shattered window’s frame. The V6 roared as Ryan squeezed the last shot. The pop was followed by a metallic thump as the Blazer disappeared the wrong way up Olive. Ryan stopped out in the street and squeezed the trigger, pointed up Olive. It clicked quietly over and over until I ran up and grasped him by the arm.

“We gotta go, man!” I said as an avalanche of tears poured down his face. He finally snapped out of it.

Angel stepped back around the corner and shouted, “Come on!” We followed him around the bend of the alley and into his garage, where he locked the door behind us. We sat in the dark with our backs slumped alongside Angel’s mom’s car. Our chests heaved in the quiet.

“Motherfuckers!” Ryan screamed.

“Shhhhh,” I said.

“You hit, man?” Angel whispered.

“Naw, that fucking pussy wasn’t even aiming for me,” Ryan sneered.

“Jesus, man,” Angel said. I watched Ryan’s mug in profile. He wiped his tear-glossed face with the back of his hand.

“Smashed my motherfucking bike, man,” Ryan whispered. “FUCKIN’ FLAKES!” he seethed.

“Look… We got to be quiet, man,” Angel cut him off as the sound of the sirens swelled in all directions.

“We got to stash the piece and hide out for a while,” Ryan said, getting up and looking out the garage door window. A squad car roared down the alley and its blue-and-red strobe lights flooded through the creases of the garage door.

“Nobody’s going nowhere right now,” I said. “We just need to chill for an hour or so.”

“I got a place,” Angel said, climbing onto the hood of his mother’s car. “Gimme it.”

Ryan handed the .25 up to Angel, and he stuffed it into the blackness of one of the rafters.

We stayed in the garage for a very long time just smoking cigarettes in silence. The swirling sirens rose and fell in the distance. I couldn’t believe Ryan had raised up the burner like that and rushed up on Heffey with him blasting that cannon! It might sound kinda silly to think it was over something like that—a bike. Especially since we were making so much loot down at the sills that he could buy a brand new bike outta the magazine. But that bike meant a lot more to him than two wheels. Hell it wasn’t about the bike at all; it was about work and dedication and the friendships we’d deepened planning and conceiving it. It was scary though. I mean, we’d all sworn to kill or be killed for each other and the neighborhood while buzzin’, but to see one of us ride out like that tryin’ to make good on the promise—that was a different animal. I could feel him slowly drifting away from us even as we sat shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the middle in that dark garage. Finally, the sirens died out completely, and we slipped off home through the gangways.

•

NEVER DID FIGURE OUT who tricked. Coulda been a neighbor who saw it while walking their kids home from the festival, or my sisters looking out for their baby brother’s best interests, or Officer O’Riley got word it was us… Yeah, probably O’Riley, but it really don’t make much difference ’cause either way, I had it comin’.

I walked up the steps of the unlit front porch. Traffic passed in sudden jets of air on Ashland down at the end of the block—bursting, then trailing off like a melody of rifle shots in the distance. I slid the key in, turned it, and opened the door. A surge of cool air poured out. I stepped in. No lights. It was darker than the night outside. I heard a sound, like ropes pulled taut and then released. A large figure loomed near in the black. A sliver of light from the alley came in through the kitchen window and down the long hall, silhouetting the profile of a heavy, thick-fingered fist curling and uncurling in the darkness just before me. It could have been an ape standing there—the wide, hunched shoulders, the long, thick arms.

“Get in the basement.” My father’s growl broke the silence like a sledgehammer through a thin film of ice.

My stomach went hollow like a million tiny pores inside opened and sucked in air. I walked past him down the hall and opened the door to the basement stairs. The light was on. Walking down the slow turn of the staircase, I thought about the time he’d thrown Lil Pat down those steps and broke his leg. The stairs ended almost into the foundation wall. I turned and passed under the bright, naked light bulb that dangled down from the exposed floor joist above. I walked down the long hall towards the back door of the basement, near the washer and dryer. The smell of detergent powder mixed with that deep, stale sewer water smell that never left our basement, or any place below ground in the city.

I walked slowly and thought about my brother Rich and the time he tried to fight Dad in the alley and got knocked cold and his nose broken. I didn’t want my nose broken. I was the only one of my brothers who hadn’t had it broken yet.

I waited for him. I could hear him swear and work himself up at the top of the stairs, then he rumbled down them. As he turned toward me and passed under the light bulb, I saw him for the first time that night. His skin looked white, like the color of lightning. His eyes twitched on his angular face. Two knots of bulging muscle gathered where each jawline met his neck. He never stopped his motion, just slowed as he got close.

“Getcher hands up,” he spat through his teeth as he raised his clutched, wide fists to his chest. I put ’em up.

It wasn’t a punch—you see those coming. His fist just grew and rose in my vision until it was all I could see. The white hair on the knuckles with the thumb pressed in underneath. It slammed into my forehead like a brick. My neck stretched, and the whole of my weight rocked back on my heels.

I stumbled backward and my arms flailed out for balance. The whole room swirled around me like I was a passenger on some terrible Tilt-A-Whirl. I leaned forward and fell toward him. He drove his fist into my chest and sent a booming exhale through my nostrils. My arm sprang out in a wild swing that caught only air. Another fist—I don’t remember where it came from—crashed into my jaw. A splash of metallic sparks sprayed through my vision, and I crumbled to my knees. Trembling, I grasped at the concrete floor hoping it would stop the room from moving.

“Naw, no, no. You’re too tough for that. You’re a big gangster now,” my father said. He snatched me up by my shirt and lifted me to my feet. Then, he grabbed my face and throat with each hand and slammed my head into the hollow wood door that closed around the dRyr. The first panel exploded into a shower of small wooden chips, and a thick splinter dug into my cheek, below the eye. The blood beaded down my face, warm. He kept my face pressed against the crumbled door, then he brought his hawk nose and beady blue eyes close. Spittle sprayed through his teeth like a rabid street dog.

“A TJO, YOU LITTLE SHIT! DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DID TO YOUR BROTHER? HE WAS...” He looked down and swallowed something back. The veins in his throat strained red. “He was perfect. He was beautiful, and they WRECKED HIM! YOUR HEAR ME?” He slammed my face into the door again. “THEY WRECKED HIM, AND THEY’RE GONNA WRECK YOU, TOO!”

He let go, and I slid to the cold slab of the basement floor, gasping. Blood seeped in my ears. He turned and walked away towards the stairs. I watched him, and as he turned to go up the steps, I saw his face for a split second—it was wet and hollow and sad. I hadn’t known. I hadn’t known how much he loved him. Crazy as it sounds, I felt closer to my father then than I ever had in my whole life.