Homage To The Dead

Sister Thorette wore a wedding ring she told us meant she was married to Jesus. In His name she ruled her kindergarten class at Saint John Cantius, the part of the kingdom of the Living God she had been entrusted with, with an iron hand. She held her big crucifix, dangling from her fingers, like a medieval prison guard holds his keys. She was a big ugly woman with a large hooked nose, a mole on the side of it with black hairs sticking out. Her face, pinched in white sat atop a tall black obelisk. Here eyes were quick, darting, searching out errant children.

You could not see her feet. She seemed to float slowly about the room with her ever-threatening yardstick. It was an all-purpose instrument, a pointer or an attention getter with a surprise rap on a desk. With it she meted out punishment, a rap on the knuckles, or ordered to hold out your hands, on the palms. Punishment was her forte. There was kneeling on your knuckles or bottle caps, the yardstick used on edge, and the mouth washed out with flax soap.

I’ve often called myself the original snot-nosed kid. A half joke is my nose has been running for fifty-eight years. To this day I don’t carry a hankie because my mother used to make me take them to school and within the first half hour the hankie would be used up and I’d have to pull it apart to find a clean spot, leading to much ridicule. As a child I spent winters with snot froze to my upper lip. Consequently, I was forever sniffing snot back up into my head, swallowing it when it got caught in my throat.

Sister Thorette played the piano. Every day at school she gave a little recital for us children. If the good sister believed anything, she believed that good little children should be seen and not heard, that if we were not called on to speak we were to be silent, especially during piano recitals. You know where this is going, don’t you? Enter the snot-nosed-kid.

Sister Thorette was convinced I was a willful, incorrigible, hell bound little troublemaker who refused to stop interrupting her piano playing by deliberately sniffing my nose. After several ignored warnings which I compounded my offence with preposterous excuses and lies, she took matters in hand, actually my ear. With a stern warning to my class mates she marched me out of the classroom to the long white porcelain sink out into the hall and began administered to me a daily communion of brown flax soap in an attempt to wash the devil from my mouth.

After a few weeks or so, she gave up in disgust. She had confirmed she was correct in her assessment. I obstinately refused to stop my sniffing. When I vomited, either from the soap or snot, it was further proof of my disobedient nature. Even the Lord was punishing me for my sins.

One day the oldest nun in the convent died and was laid out in Saint John's church. The whole school, class by class, was assembled and trouped over to the church pay our respects. One by one we were ushered to the shrunken corpse with garish, roughed cheeks, like shriveled apples. I think there was some kind of step stool over the kneeler. I could see her ruined face down in the coffin. I remember the thick smell of flowers, incense, and wax. I remember the pressure of Sister Thorette’s hand on my shoulder and neck.

“Kiss the sister on the lips and step down.”

I think I remember that, but what came next I’m unsure of. I know I didn’t want to kiss the corpse. I think I was forced. I don’t really know. One by one Sister Thorette motioned us forward, to where she stood besides the casket, to pay our respects to the dead, to the long line of black robed women who came before, to those yet to come, and to those present who tried to bare the weight of sacrifice and service as wives of the Most High God.

Angelo

Angelo lived in the red brick two-flat above Yudock. He used to take pot shots at us with his lever-action bb gun from his back porch sometime when we wandered too close in the truck lot. Little puffs of dust would jump up around us in the cinders, or we’d get a little sting. He thought it was funny and he laughed and called us out for not paying attention to where we were going, as if it was his civic duty to keep us on our toes.

He had a shooting range set up were he set bottles or soup cans on the two by four cross piece inside his enclosed back porch and shoot at them from the other side his wobbly Formica-topped kitchen table with the chrome band and legs. He’d work the action sitting padded chrome chair and take aim with his elbows on the table.

If he was in a good mood and we braved his test of courage of shooting by our feet as we climbed the back stairs to his flat, he cocked the gun for us and let us take a few shots over the table, through the open back door and into the back porch to the bottles on the ledge. If he was in a bad move we never got to the stairs. Fruit crates under the ledge for the bottles caught most of the broken glass. The rest crunch under our sneakers as we came inside.

There was usually empty Campbell chicken noodle soup cans on the white gas stove and table and dirty pots and dishes in the porcelain covered, cast iron sink. It was the kind with the molded, fluted water trap flowing into the sink. It sat on top a cabinet with one door hanging crooked and several spots of rust were the porcelain was chipped and around the drain. There was almost no furniture and what was there was pretty ratty.

If he didn’t break them first, he gave us pop bottle when we were out collecting them for deposit money. We had to pass the test for the pop bottles two. He usually didn’t hit us. When he did it was a pretty good sting and once he had to dig one out of Frankie’s arm. When he hit us he said he was sorry a lot and pleaded and threatened for us not to tell and blamed us cause he wouldn’t have hit us if we weren’t moving and jumping all over the place like scared little girls.

He looked like the rest of us, a skinny kid with a buzz-cut wearing a dago-t. We all looked pretty much the same except for fat Georgie and that we were different sizes, generally according to our ages. All of us were tan in the summers from always running in the streets, dirt smudged from living in the grimy neighborhood. I think he was twelve or fourteen years old and he was my cousin Wayne’s friend and died in Viet Nam.

Fradey Cat

It was a hot Forth of July night. Earlier, while playing, I had fallen in the debris filled trench between Yudock’s and the path behind the semis in the truck lot across Peoria street. Now, the streetlights were on making zigzag orbs of yellow light down the block. Everybody was out on their porches. The big porch outside my aunt and uncles red brick two flat was filled with my mom’s side of the family, pretty sisters in flower print dresses and husbands in dago tees. My mom’s brothers were there with their wives, too.

The older kids were still out running in the streets. Us younger ones were confined to the porch and the side walk in front. My sister Laura and cousin Karen must have been babies in their mother’s arms, or maybe inside, watched by Carol or Sharon, there brother Donald off in the military maybe.

The air was filled with the acrid smoke of fireworks, the smell of diesel fuel, pops and bangs and the whistle of pop bottle rockets, voices of the neighborhood.
I was in my short pant pajamas, both knees and an elbow bandaged from my fall in the trench, waving sparklers. My sister in some frilly dress, playing grown up, sat on the bench next to my mom swinging her saddle shoes instating trouble, telling my mom I wasn’t being careful with my sparkler. I stuck out me tongue at her.

My father yelled at me not to stick out my tongue at my sister and I’d better behave if I didn’t want a lickin.

I sat on the edged of the porch and pouted because I couldn’t do nuthin with out my dumb sister getting me in trouble and I decided to run away.

The next morning I remembered what I was going to do and I told my mom in the kitchen I didn’t like it there any more so I was going to run away.

“Let me make you a sandwich so you don’t get hungry. Go get me a long stick while you’re waiting.”

Boy, I thought. She don’t even care. When I got back with the stick she wrapped the sandwich and some cookies in and old babushka and tied it to the end of the stick and handed it to me. I was stuck and had to run away them.

“I’m going,” I said.

“Don’t stay out past the whistle,” she said.

I went grumbling up the gangway and stomped up to street level. I look both ways and crossed over to the truck lot, kicked cinders to the furniture factory. I crossed under the railroad tracks and came out by yellow cab and made my way north to Chicago Avenue. I made my way east to the iron bridge over the river with Montgomery Wards on the other side. It was the farthest from home I’d been by myself.

It was a long way across the bridge. I had seen them open before, separated in the middle the section sticking up into the sky like gigantic metal jaws. Turning back was humiliating. I was a little fradey cat, just like my sister said.

Some Things We Did.

Pop bottle deposits were a source of spending money for ice cream and candy bars, Kayo’s, a chocolate flavored drink, or Nehi sodas. With our wagons, Frankie and I would scour the neighborhood for pop bottles, Two cents for the 12 ounce bottles and a whole nickel for the quarts, but the quart bottles were very rare. Sometime we made a pretty good haul at the furniture factory where uncle Stanley’s brother, Johnny, worked.

I don’t remember how much things cost but a wagonload would get us both a pop and something else at the butchers and there was always the penny candies in small bins inside the glass counter full of smeared finger prints, no matter how much the butcher told us not to touch the glass. I wasn’t supposed to get any of the ones with out wrappers. We’d get our stuff and go around the corner on Huron and sit in the entry bay with two locked door at JP Shmidts. I don’t know why but some times there was chicken feet in there and we got sticks to push them into the street before we sat down and see who could drink their Kayo’s the fastest.

I was a shoeshine boy for a summer or two. My dad made me a box for paste and brushes and rags. It had a place to put your foot up on and a strap for carrying it over my shoulder. I gave a pretty good spit shine for a nickel. I’d set up at the bottom of the metal stairs leading to the el platform over past Checker cab.

“Shine, Mister? Only a nickel.”

Sometimes in the summer with my sister and cousins Janise and Linda, we’d set up a Kool-Aid stand there. Me and Janise and Linda played a lot together. We tried to get my sister to come out and play but most of the time she just wanted to sit around and draw.

Sometimes we went to Montgomery Wards to the top floor to look out the big windows down at the river and the tug boat pushing big barges of coal. I was afraid of the bridge we had to cross to get there and would make my sister hold my hand. In the middle she would shout, “The bridge is opening,” yank her hand free and run the rest of the way across.

I guess she was paying me back for the winter when my nose would constantly run and on the way home from school sometimes when I got mad at her for telling me to quit sniffling and blow my nose I blew it on her dress.

Zha Zha

Zha Zha was fat Georgy’s and Monaca’s mother. Zha Zha was not her real name, but I don’t remember her being called anything else.

“Here comes Zha Zha,” my uncle Paul would announce with a smile and a leer that sometimes got him in trouble with my aunt Lor. You couldn’t blame him. She was a statuesque, brick shithouse Polish blonde; poured into whatever she was wearing, stretch pants and flats with a button down top. She carried a snooty, aristocratic air out of place for the gritty, industrial neighborhood.

She was always calling the fire department for locking her self out of her flat on the second story above the butchers.

“Looks like Zha Zha locked herself out again,” uncle Paul said, commenting about the fire truck in front of the butcher’s and a ladder leaned up against a second story window. Her husband was a fat balding man it a suit. The firemen were lean and muscular. Zha Zha locked her self out a lot. I could hear the innuendo in my uncle’s voice, the speculation of possibilities, wistfulness when he announced, “Here comes Zha Zha.”

Playing at Fat Georgy’s, her presence filled their modest, neat apartment, Her musky perfume mixing with the sauerkraut smell of all my friends’ homes. She had a heavy earthiness about her and I was always aware of where she was in the flat, aware of the swell of her breast, the curve of her generous hips, the solidity of her stance. She often touched when she talked to me, tousled my hair, leaning down to touch my shoulder, asking me in her Polish accent if I wanted to say for lunch. She was hypnotic, mesmerizing.

She worried about her son and the streets he played in. She fed him too much and made him a momma’s boy in his neat to clean short pant and shirts.

“I’m not supposed to get dirty. I’m not supposed to play in the truck lots. I’m not supposed to leave the block.”

He chafed under her perpetual watching and leaning out of her window and calling when she didn’t know where he was. I dreamed of her calling me, of being a fireman when I grew up.

I watched her daughter, nine-year-old Monica, out of the corner of eight-year-old eyes. Unlike fat Georgy, Monica, with her red cheeks, pale skin and blond pixie-cut hair, took after her mother. I blushed and deigned vehemently liking her when the other kid sang,

“Mikey and Monica sitting in a tree,
K I S S I N G.
First came love, then came marriage,
Then came Monica with a baby carriage.

Secretly, when I grew up, I planed to marry both of them.

Hellions

After Pete turned mean he used to come after us kid. One time he got hold of Monica, Fat Georgy’s sister. He grabbed her by the shoulders and started shaking her, yelling in her face with his rotten breath. My uncle Paul chased him off with a two by four. So the first one who saw him coming would yell, “Pete. He’s coming.” We would all scatter hiding until he passed.

He must have come out of his shack at the bottom of the cinder pile in the truck lot across Huron, but we didn’t see him until he was in front of JP Schmitt’s. Somebody gave the alarm and Frankie and me ran to the empty apartments in the white frame building standing up against Pumpilio’s where he lived on the second floor. The second floor had a wrap around, wooden porch on the Peoria street and truck lot side of the building. On the ground floor on the truck lot side in the center was a small closed in porch with and two screen and storm doors, one facing Peoria street and one facing the back of the lot and the Soo Line. From Peoria street you could see right through. It gave access to the front and back apartment. There were dark cold sheds under the house we weren’t supposed to play in. You could see down there from the street where a railing kept you from falling in. On the truck lot side there was no porch and the cinders came to the wall.

When we saw Pete and Trixie we ran in the little closed it porch and I got the back door latch and was fumbling with the latch on the street side when Pete saw me.

“He saw me.”

Frankie had run to the front apartment and was already hiding under the bed. It was a bare, pee-stained mattress, the kind with the pattern of dimples with two short strings coming from each dimple. It was on one of the bed frames with the rectangular steel grating held to the frame by short oblong springs around the parameter.

We lay beneath the bed on the worn linoleum floor holding our breaths. “Maybe he’s not coming,” Frankie whispered.

We heard the door rattle and shake, rattle and shake. I started praying seven-year-old-Catholic-boy prayers, promising Jesus I’d never be bad again. A last rattle and then, silence.

“He’s gone,” I said

“Go see.”

I scrunched up my face for courage. I started to side a way from Frankie. There was another rattle. I shot back over the linoleum. The door screeched open. Trixe’s over grown toenails clattered across the floor. The screen door slammed closed.

“I seen you come in here, you little bastards,” Pete said, his voice ragged and mean, not at al like when I used to bring him leftovers. “Find’em, girl. Git’em.

I redoubled my prayer efforts. I promised not to ever miss church. Trixie came into the room we were in. She was a squat, little, spotted brown mutt. She was either pregnant or like she was now. From under the bed I could she her bruised, swollen tits dragging on the floor. I told God I’d go to church every day before school and I wouldn’t tell that dirty joke we told each other over and over and laughed until our sides hurt.

A cowboy out on the range comes into town on his motorcycle. He parks it in front of the local saloon and goes inside. When he comes out there’s a drunken Indian standing outside where his motorcycle used to be. The cowboy asks the Indian where his motorcycle is. The Indian says, “Me no know, me no tell. Me push button, run like hell.”

My sister gasped in shock when she heard me tell it. “You’re going to hell,” she said. “I’m telling.” I guess I figured it was a good bargaining chip.

Pete came in. We could see his work boots, worn to a frayed sole, and the greasy cuff of his soiled pants. “Find’em, Trix,”

She trotted out of the room. With our ears we followed her taping nails to the other apartment. Pete followed mumbling to himself about the dammed kid having no respect. We heard him moving around and Trixe’s toenails and after a while the screen door slam.

We thanked God up and down for saving us from Pete and his dog and eventually snuck cautiously out from under the bed and out of the apartment. Of course we forgot about our prayers almost as fast as we made them and soon we were ruing around the neighborhood getting into more trouble like the little hellions everybody said we were.

Why I Wanted To Get Bigger

My hillbilly opponent was a little smaller than me, but not as skinny, and probably had two names. I know he had red buzz cut hair with a scab on top of his head were somebody nicked him with the clippers. He was grinning and he had huge ears sticking out like Alfred E Newman from Mad Magazine.

“No kicking, scratching or biting, or hair pullin like you all’s a girl," Claude said.

“And no gouging the eyes,” Wayne said. The group had formed a circle, my opponent in the center. Wayne gave me a shove toward him. “First one that gives, looses.”

Our fists raised, we circled each other. He didn’t have any shoes on and kept grinning except just before he threw a punch when he dropped the grin and through out a fist. I kept what I hope was seen as a determined scowl on my face so no one could see how scared I was, bobbing away from his punches.

“You all gonna dance or fight?”

“Hit em,” Wayne said.

We exchanged punches and went back to circling. He hit me hard in the shoulder. I hit him in the stomach. It felt like my punch couldn’t knock over a fly. We went at each other again.

“Now they’re wrestling. I thought you was tough?” Wayne sounded like he was disgusted. We were rolling around in the dirt. Every body was yelling for us to hit each other.

I saw this movie once. A James Bond movie maybe, where one of the bad guys would scissor the guy he was fighting with his legs until the guy passed out. It didn’t work that way when I tried it. The little hillbilly got his arms under my knees and folded my legs over me, pinning me to the ground, but, with my ankles locked, I was squeezing his head and smashing his ears between my knees. We stayed like that a while and then they called it a draw.

“What was that?” Wayne said as we walked back. “He kicked your ass, you know. I thought you was tougher than that,” He had said that before. He was disapointed in me.

“It was a draw.”

“He kicked your ass. And you know it, too.”

One time me a Frankie saw Yudoc coming from Laginza’s. It was after Yudoc had whacked me in the side with the mop handle for taking his tire. He had to come up the stairs to street level. I hid behind the fence separating the sunken yard for the sidewalk while Frankie coaxed him to come up and out the gate so I could jump him. And that’s what happened.

I knew I could beat him up and he was afraid of me. He came out the gate and I jumped up and started punching him and he laughed at me. When I got tired he broke free and ran home. He was always a faster runner than I was. For years after that the only reason I wanted to get bigger was so I could hit people harder.