Chicago
Those boys were on the street again tonight, three of them. They are ten, maybe twelve years old. One is chubby and wears glasses. Tonight they yelled, “Nerd! You…prick.”
I’d never have talked that way to a grown-up when I was their age.
November 4, 1987
Chicago
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read I LOVE KILLING COMMUNISTS. The word love was replaced by a heart shape I’m guessing they’ll put on the typewriter keyboard any day now, right beside the exclamation point. The bumper sticker was on a Ford Fairlane on Montrose Avenue.
November 7, 1987
Chicago
I saw a family—a mother, father, and ten-year-old boy—walk down Leland Avenue today. It was raining, and when the mother told her son to put up the hood on his Windbreaker, the boy said, “Aww, lemme alone. My fuckin’ hair ain’t wet.”
She responded, sweetly, “Maybe not, but it will be.”
November 14, 1987
Chicago
Barbara went to clear the dishes off the table behind me at the IHOP tonight. A couple was sitting there, both in their sixties, and they started smoking the moment they’d finished.
“Was everything all right with your meal?” Barbara asked.
“No,” the woman said. “No, it was not. The meat was all tough and the vegetables was cold.”
“Well, why didn’t you say anything?” Barbara asked.
And the woman said, “We was hongry.”
November 16, 1987
Chicago
Steve Lafreniere loaned me a few copies of a St. Louis newspaper called the Evening Whirl, which comes out daily and is completely devoted to black-on-black crime. Criminals are pictured on every page beneath headlines like “Fiend Sneaks In While Parents Are Asleep, Sodomizes Their Two Sons” and “Mean Pastor of Church Dates Two Brothers, 10 and 11, He’s Caught.”
This man rapes two kids, and the paper calls him mean?
“It was revealed how the sex mad faggot tagged one boy that he especially adored and wrecked him. He would tie him up by his hands and body and go to work on his victim like a greedy hog that had missed a meal. He caught the boy like a rooster running after a hen and dragged him into the office and oh, Glory! What a session, oh, my!”
There is a short article in one issue headlined “You Don’t Know Who in the Hell I Am, Do You? I’m Mr. Muckity Muck with the Big Buck. Mess with Me and You’ll Have No Luck.”
Another article is titled “Andy Gray Said, ‘I Am Freakish. I Love My Own Sex and I Like ’Em Young. If They Yield to Me I’ll Give ’Em Some Tongue. I Can’t Help How I Was Born, I’m Gonna Have Fun and Live, Right On!’” It says in this article that Mr. Gray “snorted and cavorted with other men.”
This paper is not to be believed. An annual subscription costs $35. The ads are placed by lawyers, funeral homes, and bail bondsmen.
November 17, 1987
Chicago
Police caught the guy responsible for smashing windows and painting swastikas outside Jewish businesses on Devon Avenue. He’s out on bail now, and this morning’s paper included a picture of him. What strikes me is that he has a very small mouth, smaller than a baby’s. I mean, tiny. If you wanted him to suck your thumb, you’d have to grease it up first. The article says he belongs to a skinhead group and has tattoos, which is strange, I think, because Jews in concentration camps had shaved heads and tattoos. You’d think the anti-Semites would go for a different look.
December 27, 1987
Raleigh
Tiffany left this morning. Last night we sat around in the basement with company and she told us that she often gets gas trapped in her neck. She pointed to a spot beneath her ear, saying, “It’s right here.”
I never heard of such a thing.
She spent most of her vacation on the telephone arguing with black men who are a mystery to us. Some we’ve met once or twice, but she never tells us the nature of their relationships. It’s not normal to spend hours in your room crying over misunderstandings with people who are just friends. She left herself out of a lot this Christmas. Every night has ended with Amy, Gretchen, Paul, and me sitting on one bed or another and laughing until four in the morning.
1988
January 3, 1988
Chicago
It was cold when I returned to Chicago yesterday—eleven degrees. I took the bus into town and was surprised when the driver kicked someone off. It was a belligerent man who’d been arguing with him over what seemed to me like nothing. After a few minutes the passengers started putting their two cents in, and not long afterward the guy was thrown off. “I hope you freeze to death,” the driver shouted after he’d closed the door.
The first Chicago baby of 1988 was born a few minutes after midnight. A suburban limo service had promised a special ride to the child and its parents, and other businesses had made similar offers. On the news tonight they showed the mother and father receiving a box of fine cigars and a dozen roses before getting into the backseat of a Rolls-Royce. According to the reporter, the two are not married. Both are sixteen years old, and black, and from the West Side. They looked very happy.
January 6, 1988
Chicago
It is bitterly cold out tonight. I was on Irving Park Road walking past Graceland Cemetery, on my way home from the IHOP, when a van pulled over and the driver motioned to me. I ignored him, and he followed slowly behind me and honked. When the window came down, I saw that the guy was missing a few teeth and that he wasn’t much older than me. He asked where I was going, and when I said, “Home,” he asked if he could do anything for me.
That stretch of Irving is usually busy with prostitutes. If he thought that’s what I was, then the rules have definitely changed since I left Chicago for the holidays. Here I was, wearing two coats, two hats, and glasses. I thought of accepting a ride but said that I was fine walking. Get into a car with a stranger on that stretch of Irving and you can’t really complain should something awful happen.
January 11, 1988
Chicago
I ran into Shirley on Broadway and Irving. She was my neighbor on Cuyler, the only other native-born American in the building. Shirley wears an overcoat, a housedress, and slacks all at the same time. She has only one visible tooth, and it’s on the bottom. I asked about Ray, the man she lived with, and she told me he’d passed away on August 30, of cancer or something. Ray was always drunk. He wore ski caps, like Shirley does, and women’s glasses.
“He died on me” was how she put it. She said that her brother had died on her too. Then she laughed, like they were off somewhere, hiding together.
January 13, 1988