Never a City So Real (4 page)

Many lives were lost, and the strike was eventually smothered. When Pullman died, four years later, he was buried in the dead of night, in a hole the size of a large room. He had become so despised that he feared his grave would be desecrated, so he left instructions that his mahogany casket was to be buried in cement overlaid with bolted-down railroad ties. “He just got it into his head that someone would desecrate his body, maybe cut his penis off and stick it in his nose,” Sadlowski tells me, making me wonder just how much he'd thought about this. Pullman is buried at the Graceland Cemetery, which, as Sadlowski says, “is as good a book as any on Chicago, and on the rich and how they thought of themselves.” Marshall Field is buried there. So is Louis Sullivan, who died penniless and has a rather modest tombstone, although an elaborate monument was later built by friends.

As we're leaving the Pullman church, Gilmak, one of the students, admires the restoration work on the building's green limestone and thanks Sadlowski for the tour. Gilmak's grandfather worked at South Works, his dad at Republic, and his uncle at Wisconsin Steel. “Sadlowski,” he told me later, “gave me more respect for those guys.”

Sadlowski's neighborhood, once largely Eastern European, is now mostly Mexican-American, a change that not all of the community's longtime members are happy about. Not long ago, when Sadlowski went to get a haircut, he told his longtime barber that he had just returned from visiting Tucson, Arizona.

“Yeah, they found a truckload of them spics in the desert there dead,” the barber said. “Should've been fifty of the sonofabitches. We wouldn't have to bother with 'em then.”

Sadlowski rose from his chair. “I come in here to get a haircut and I got to be subjected to that shit and pay for it? That's the same kind of crap they said about my grandfather a hundred years ago.”

“It's nothing personal,” the barber said.

“It's very personal to me.” Sadlowski replied, and left without the haircut.

This, in the end, is what it's all about for Sadlowski: recognizing that, indeed, the past is present. It's easy to come down here and think to yourself, “This is a dying community,” but it isn't. It's a changing one, now lined with establishments such as Armando's Tire Repair, D'Madera Furniture, Ruiz Funeral Homes, and Las Delicias Grocery. Like the carpenters and millwrights in Sadlowski's class, the neighborhood is picking itself up, brushing off the sulfur, and becoming something new.

Once while I was visiting his home, Sadlowski showed me the rock garden he had created alongside his bungalow. It's a collection of stones and waste from the mills. There's a basketball-size mass of slag from South Works and a piece from another mill, Jones & Laughlin. He shows me a fist-size lump of coke from Acme and a paving stone from a street in South Chicago. There's a chunk of raw iron he found at the beach by South Works, where his dad and he used to sit, eat shrimp, drink beer and talk, and which is now being turned into a park.

Unexpectedly moved, I asked Sadlowski whether this rock garden was intended as a monument to what used to be. Sadlowski scowled.

“This isn't a monument to the fuckin' steel mills,” he snapped. He placed a conciliatory hand on my shoulder and explained. “It's a way to enhance my memories of the guys who worked there—the comradeship, the decency, the knowledge I got from them. I owe everything I have to those people. Without them and without Marlene I'd be physically dead. I truly feel that way.”

Millie and Brenda

I'm having lunch at Manny's, an old-style Jewish delicatessen just south of the Loop, with two longtime friends, Mildred Wortham and Brenda Stephenson. Millie is impulsive and vocal, Brenda more cautious and even-tempered. They're always in full bloom, bedecked in colorful hip-hugging dresses in the summer, floppy hats and dazzling pantsuits in the winter.

Both of them grew up in Rockwell Gardens, a West Side public housing complex that in the 1980s had the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of murders, rapes, and assaults of any neighborhood in the city. They have since moved, though they still live on the West Side. For seventeen years, they have worked for a small organization, West Side Future, which assists young mothers in their early years of parenting. Brenda and Millie hand out diapers and toothbrushes (when I became a father, they loaded me down with gear as well), and pass along their wisdom. In a sense, they're professional busybodies. Once, I tagged along with Brenda as she was doing home visits; just as we were leaving the apartment of a nineteen-year-old mother, Brenda whipped around and demanded, “Are you pregnant?” “No way,” the young woman replied. “Just thought I'd ask when your guard was down,” laughed Brenda, who then kissed the teenager's son before skipping out the door.

On this particular day, as we're finishing our meal at Manny's, the two start giggling like little girls. Millie asks the question. Well, it's really more like a statement.

“So, Alex, I hear you got a little boy on the West Side.”

I'm befuddled, not sure what or whom she's referring to.

Brenda says, “People say he looks just like you. Real soft-skinned. Curly hair.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask. I laugh, nervously, which is probably not the best thing to do in the face of such a live rumor.

“C'mon, Alex,” Millie says, putting her arm around my shoulder. “You can tell us. People say you got a boy by a girl you know'd on the West Side.”

“You got to be kidding,” I say.

“Yeah, and people say you don't go see him, or nothing.”

I tell them that's simply not true—not that I don't see my son on the West Side, but that any such son exists.

“You can tell us,” Brenda says.

“There's nothing to tell.” My voice starts to rise. I know I'm sounding a tad defensive. And though by the time we leave Manny's they tell me that they believe me, I'm not convinced they do. The next time we get together, Brenda pokes me in the ribs, winks, and asks how my boy is.

 

For fifteen years, Brenda, Millie, and I have been having lunch every couple of months—to gossip, to commiserate, to share stories, to catch up. Once, in the middle of lunch at Edna's, a soul food restaurant on the West Side, two beefy men sat down at the booth adjacent to ours. They interrupted our conversation and started flirting with Brenda and Millie. “Hey, babe, where you live?” one asked. “What you up to later?” The other man, who I later learned was a local minister, squeezed into the booth next to me, leaned over the table, and in a deep baritone voice complimented Brenda and Millie on their outfits. It was as if I wasn't there. I figured Brenda and Millie were enjoying it, but in fact they were furious on my behalf. Finally Brenda cut the man short, nodded toward me, and said in a level voice, “He's got us covered.” Both men looked perplexed. They must have thought I was the luckiest man alive. When they left the restaurant, Brenda chastised me. “Next time,” she said, “you tell them you got us covered. Hear me. Don't let nobody do you like that.”

Brenda and Millie grew up in the same high-rise, just floors apart. When they were in their twenties, single and swinging, they'd each use the other's apartment as a place to take their dates. That way, they told me, men wouldn't know where they lived. The two are inseparable. They're good at sniffing out parties thrown by politicians, and on occasion they have dragged me along for the free food, and often good music and dancing. People often confuse them. “I'm called Millie all the time,” Brenda says. Because Brenda is more reserved, Millie will often negotiate with men who want to ask her for a date. The two used to breakfast at Moon's, a working person's diner up the street from Rockwell Gardens, next to a post office. “We'd be sitting there and guys would come in, and they'd say to Millie, ‘Who's your friend?' ” Brenda recalls.

Millie laughs. “So I tell 'em, ‘C'mon, let's get some coffee and breakfast, and I'll tell you about her.' ”

“I wouldn't know a thing,” says Brenda.

“And I'm telling her, ‘Girl, order your breakfast, 'cause I know it's taken care of.' ”

They can get a free ride anywhere in the city. Livery drivers will drop what they're doing to tote them from one place to another. Once, they got a lift home from a tavern in an ambulance, with sirens screaming; another time they hitched a ride in a hearse.

My friendship with Millie and Brenda revolves around food. It's what we do when we get together: eat. Millie's anxious because her son is on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East, so she calls, and we make lunch plans. Or I'm trying to get help for a young man I've known for years who I suspect is doing heroin, and so I call them. We make lunch plans.

Chicago is a mecca for some of the nation's finest chefs, but you'll learn more about the city itself from its neighborhood restaurants—those establishments where the food is served in heaps rather than manicured slivers, where, if you eavesdrop wisely or linger long enough, you can hear the stories of the neighborhood, of its people, of its legends and of its stresses and strains.

 

One day, over lunch at Manny's, Millie tells me of their encounter with a well-known pimp on the West Side named, uninventively, Don Juan. He wore emerald green suits and strutted around the neighborhood as if he owned all the women there. He once boasted to a local reporter that “in fifteen years only one of my girls ever got frost-bitten.” He took a liking to Brenda, and one afternoon the two friends were traveling on the Madison Street bus, when Don Juan pulled up alongside in his emerald green Cadillac, first honking his horn, then pulling in front of the bus. Don Juan sent his driver on board; the man walked up to Brenda and said, “You ain't got to ride no bus, baby.”

“I ain't going anywhere,” Brenda told him. “I'm fine.”

“C'mon, baby, your friend can come, too,” he said, pointing to Millie.

Brenda turned her back on him.

Millie's telling me the story, laughing and shaking her head, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch an older gentleman at the next table clearly enjoying the yarn. He hurriedly buries his head in his newspaper.

Manny's seems to invite eavesdropping, in large part because of the medley of people it attracts. One weekday morning, I'm there for breakfast, and at one of the nearby Formica tables, four regulars—all elderly men—start passing around something I can't quite make out. One of them, a retired deputy police superintendent, is smoking a cigar. Another, who used to run a plumbing supply business, is doing all the talking. He's a short man with a big mouth. He appears to be showing his friends some trinkets he's hawking. He holds up a pacifier. When he shakes it, it lights up.

“Kids love 'em,” he tells his friends.

“Cost a nickel apiece. Sell it for a buck ninety-nine. Not bad,” one of them replies.

The retired plumbing supplier shrugs. “Cost me twenty cents,” he says.

The former deputy police superintendent gets the pacifier to light up. “Cute,” he says. “But how do you turn this thing off?”

“Got to squeeze it.”

I'm sitting a few tables away with Manny's owner, Kenny Raskin, who looks over at the bearer of the pacifiers. “He's been banned from here twice,” Raskin tells me. “He swears a lot and starts arguments with customers. But his brother convinced me to let him back in.” Raskin shrugs. “Eh, I don't like to have enemies.”

Indeed, over the years Manny's has become neutral turf. During one stretch in the late 1980s, Raskin recalls, there'd be a group of First Ward politicos seated at one table, many of whom were under investigation for organized crime, and then a group of plainclothed detectives from the organized crime unit sitting a few tables away. “They'd talk to each other,” says Raskin. “They were friendly.” Manny's is a political hangout, for politicians of all denominations, which in this fully Democratic city represents, some might say, the paragon of tolerance. On a recent election day, U.S. Senate candidate Dick Durbin brought his family here after he'd voted. Mayor Daley comes in occasionally (matzoh ball soup and corned beef sandwich), though he usually sends an aide to pick up his lunch. Harold Washington, when he was mayor, preferred the baked short ribs, and often he'd come in toward closing when the restaurant was empty to meet with constituents and advisers. The present governor, Rod Blagojevich, who lunches here regularly, signed his minimum-wage bill at Manny's. And the former governor, George Ryan, a Republican, came here for lunch when he was wrestling over whether to commute the sentences of death-row inmates. While he was chewing on his corned beef sandwich, his cell phone rang. It was Nelson Mandela, urging him to clear death row, which Ryan did the next day.

Manny's is in a neighborhood that used to be predominately Jewish, but that is now more commercial than residential. It's a quick cab ride from downtown, in a neighborhood of small clothing and shoe stores, just a few blocks away from the city's once bustling Maxwell Street Sunday market. It's been around since 1945, when Raskin's grandfather, Jack, opened Sonny's, which he soon changed to Manny's, after his son. When Jack died in 1993, his funeral procession received a large police escort because the then-chief-of-police (chicken noodle soup and grilled American cheese sandwich) was a regular customer. Raskin, who sports a goatee and mustache, has put on a bit of a paunch over the years, which he explains is due to his habit of “nibbling” in the kitchen. “You grab a potato pancake,” he tells me, “or the corned beef, or take a piece of French bread and hollow it out and stuff it with a couple of meatballs.” His favorite meals, he tells me, are the beef stew and oxtail stew, both original recipes from more than half a century ago.

A group of middle-aged women makes their way down the cafeteria line, ordering their breakfasts. Raskin gently waves. City inspectors, he tells me, gathering for their inspection of the newly rebuilt Soldier Field, the stadium where the Chicago Bears play. “I hate it,” he says, “ 'cause I feel like I'm under constant scrutiny.” And, indeed, a few weeks later one of them had him adjust one of the sneeze guards on the service line.

A pacifier flies through the air, from the retired plumbing supplier to another friend. “What d'ya think?” the pacifier salesman hollers. Heads turn. Raskin smiles. “Once every couple of weeks,” he tells me, “I have to tell him to shut up.”

 

The first place Brenda and Millie ever took me to was Edna's Restaurant, where the minister tried to pick them up. It's in a tough part of town. But as I would learn, Edna Stewart, the restaurant's owner, is a tough woman. Edna is sixty-six, and her curled hair has turned gray. She sports large rectangular-shaped eyeglass frames that are so old—more than twenty-five years—and so garish—gold-trimmed—that they actually look fashionable.

The restaurant is located on Madison Street, the main route through the West Side, which is a collection of pawn shops, currency exchanges, small clothing stores, storefront churches, and liquor stores (I once counted seventeen in a twelve-block stretch). Immediately following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this stretch of land went up in flames, and nearly four decades later it's still trying to recover. (Edna's, not surprisingly, was spared by arsonists during the riots.) The restaurant is sandwiched between the offices of a family doctor and a small pharmacy on the corner, and it stands across the street from a vacant lot that extends nearly an entire block. Down the street is Marshall High School, which has one of the best girls' basketball teams in the city (they have an astonishing record over the past twenty-five years of 766 games won and 84 lost, which makes it worthwhile to attend one of their games). A few blocks beyond that is Providence–St. Mel, an inner-city college prep school founded by a no-nonsense, former guidance counselor Paul Adams, who saved the school after the Archdiocese closed it in 1978, virtually abandoning the West Side.

My first visit to Edna's was on a hot summer day in 1991, and accompanying Brenda, Millie, and me was a playwright from New York who had been assigned to write the television script based on my book
There Are No Children Here.
He was a gentle, softspoken man, but after we had spent a few days together I began to get uneasy; I began to think that he didn't believe all that I'd written. So I took him to the most decrepit of the high-rises, introduced him to the meanest of the gang members, pointed out the wealthiest of the drug dealers. And on this, his last day, I thought I'd introduce him to Brenda and Millie who, I'd hoped, would affirm all that I'd written. At first, however, the lunch didn't go exactly as I'd anticipated—because Brenda and Millie, while they're realists, are also almost inexplicably upbeat. I say inexplicably, because given where they're from and what they do, they have every reason to be cynical, if not outright pessimistic. So over our lunch of fried chicken and liver, collard greens, and candied yams, Brenda and Millie filled the screenwriter not with horror stories but with tales of people who were managing, who were getting by despite all that bore down on them. Then, just as they were regaling him with inspirational tales, a young boy maybe fourteen or fifteen years old ran into the restaurant and ducked behind the heating grille. A gaggle of boys suddenly appeared outside, and one of them pulled a pistol out of a brown paper bag and started shooting. Needless to say, we feared for our lives, and we ducked under the table. As we lay there, one on top of the other, all I could think was,
Now the screenwriter will believe me.