The Old Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

dry, coarse heat that scorched the lawns yellow and deepened the skin tones of the children. Grandma had told Jan’n’Rose to stay out of the sun so their Afro-Caribbean skin didn’t turn black, so they stayed in the house most of the day and walked the neighborhood at night. They’d go over to the apartment building two doors down to hang out with their friend Maria and flirt with the Mexican boys who lived there. They were always on the lookout for Lil Pat, Blake, and Rich, but they didn’t mind me tagging along. Maria was tall and thin with long, black, curly hair and thick, purple lips. Sometimes, for a joke, Maria would take me by the hand and lead me into her bedroom. We’d lay together on her bed with the lights off, and she’d moan, calling out my name—loud—so my sisters and the others could hear her in the next room, and I’d kiss her full lips in the dark. She’d gasp quietly with the giggling from the next room flooding in through the thin walls. The scent of her grape lip gloss made my mouth water as it soothed my always-chapped lips. One time, she even let me give her a hickey on the side of her soft, warm neck with the low light of the alley lamps filtering in through her window.
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    I STILL MADE MY WALK to collect the protection money along Clark for the TJOs every Sunday. Ryan started coming with, and we’d spend the afternoon joking about the things we’d stolen along the way. It was a team action: one of us going up to the manager to collect the envelope and buy something like candy for a quarter, while the other grabbed chips or lighters or anything of value to a kid. Sometimes, Lil Pat and Mickey would pick us up and drive us down to Montrose Beach where we would wade out into the blue and marvel at the clear between our feet like a lie. We’d skip rocks and climb on the huge concrete cubes lining some parts along the shore as the older guys drank beer, smoked joints, counted the money, and laughed at the profile of the city they thought they owned.
    Ryan lived at the Dead-End-Docks on Paulina Ave. between Thorndale and Rosehill Ave. Paulina dead-ends at Rosehill into this six-foot, concrete, castle-style wall; the same style wall as the ones that encircle Rosehill Cemetery a few blocks west. His alley butted up against the Clark Street. Ace Hardware’s loading docks, which made the alley three-times the width of any in the neighborhood. That drew little knuckleheads from all over. They swarmed around back there incessantly. It was like the United Nations of juvenile delinquents: blacks, Irish, Mexicans, mutt whites, Assyrians, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans. They shot hoops on a plastic milk crate with the bottom stomped out. Someone just nailed it to a wooden electricity pole, and they played with a mini basketball. The alley ended in a big vacant parking lot. A legion of bold, yellow-headed dandelions sprouted up through the cracks in the old asphalt. Past the lot, across Rosehill Ave., there was a row of small houses with full-leaved trees nestled around them. The immense, tan structure of the hospital leered above them—the only present and capable authority.
    I was over there one afternoon that August. It was hot out like the inside of an oven set to bake. Ryan and I leaned against the fence separating the alley from the lot. The top horizontal bar was warped in a low-hung bow from the kids jumping it while running from the cops and each other. Ryan had his shirt off, and his thick shoulders and neck were seared red with chalk-white sunblock slathered over them. The heavy freckles were like brown sugar sprinkled up his arms and across his brow and cheeks. He wore gray sweatpants and black and white Chuck Taylors.
    This little runt of a black kid named BB spliced a mini basketball between his legs. He had a missing top-front tooth and crazy graphics etched into his scalp. He was in the middle of a lecture on how