Chapter Five:
Frankie and Johnny and South Clark Street...
WE MOVED INTO AN APARTMENT BUILDING Near North Side (maybe?). It was off "Boul Mich." (To interrupt myself - which I am fond of doing - this is name of grand oldtime typeface from my much later years. I couldn't resist here. You didn't know I knew "Flyspeck Condensed" from "Tru Cut Caslon", did you? (Hot type, too - from the days before electronics and all this sissy digitization, when the cranky linotype operators deliberately squirted you with hot metal from a fast "Etaoin Shrdlu" as you walked by - but the most of you will have no idea here what I am referring to, and that's okay, too...). BTW, that latter typeface alone has fueled regrets I never wrote a "Western" - for old "True Cut" would have been my gunslinger hero for sure... with his trusty sidekick, "Bodoni Bold", at his side - thus making it one of those Eye-talian Westerns so popular here few years back. Had the Western I never wrote been made into a film that was never shown, "Dino" Martin, the archetypical Eyetie move star, could have played "Bodoni"... Sigh).
Sorry 'bout that: hard to write whole life here as one continuous forward-stream - there are jumps and regressions you see - just like in real world... Oh yes, my first boss, the incredible George Rhine, whom we will meet many chapters along in this narrative, rubbed my nose in type and layout (without which, writers are only wannabe's). I see his old type manual yet there on his Office Desk: over and over down the page in different faces (committed to memory) it said: "Oh! Matchless Among the Arts of Men, Is This, Our Art of Printing..." Nearest thing to a mantra we wordsmiths ever had; I get a thrill to this day just mumbling it over once again...
Where were we?
Yes. The Windy City ("...slaughterer of hogs," right?). We arrived, cranky and worn-out on some nameless Pullman in the old Union Station one night... lightly dusted down with coal smoke and cinders. Pop was only a young guy himself in those years and yet a stranger to Chicago. He asked the boys down at the office where might he find suitable quarters for his growing family ... and they had told him, "Out on Michigan, the XXX-hundred block - nice places! Just right for young family." And so we took a taxi to our new abode.
It was a big apartment complex . On way in, Mom had seen a grocery store on corner and as we had nothing in place to eat - she sent Pop out to buy some groceries. Soon he was back - with the groceries - and his eyes out on stalks!
"Cecil!" my Mom said. "Whatever is wrong with you?"
"Berna," he said (the perceptive here will have noted, I was named for my mother, and my sister named for my father - family dysfunctionalism, as it were, in the olden days), he replied (out of earshot of we wee ones as I am told, so what follows is largely you might say, sort of a paraphrase):
"You will never believe! On the way back, I was propositioned three times!"
This doubtless fails to shock modern ears quite so much - but in these Depression Years of the distant '30's, things were not taken quite so lightly...
Nor did that end it. For we ate, and Mom tucked us in, and all retired. Soon the shrieks of women began to punctuate the night air. Followed by the hoarse hollering of males - on the floors both above and below us, with now and then an accompanying whiskey bottle ricocheting down the air shaft walls outside our window...
Next morning, down at the office, my Pop remonstrated with his new pals over the "...fine place they had got him into."
"Well," said they. "What side of the street is your place on?" Pop looked blankly at them - "Why, why, I think we are on the north side of the street," he said.
"Well, that explains it!" they said. "You are on the wrong side of the street! Actually (they conferred briefly among themselves) and then came sprightly back: "You have moved into the onetime headquarters of Hymie Weiss!" (The late Hymie, of course, being a notable hood of those times and famous with his pal, Dion O'Bannion (also recently dead of lead poisoning!) as sworn opponents of Big Al (Capone) across town). And that is how it actually was in Chicago back in the "Gangster Era." Don't take my word for it (I was still in short pants), but if interested, and your rod is handy, check in with... Hymie-the-Pole
We moved again that night! LOL!
We lived right on the Lake I remember. A sandy beach came up almost to the apartment back door. We were on the sixth floor. My assigned job was to "take care of Ceily". Since she could dig on all fours faster than even a dog, she could tunnel under the cyclone fence faster than a wink and my tenuous grip on her sun suit straps never sufficed and once clear she would be legging it for the deep blue waters of Lake Michigan! My howls of alarm, of course, would rend the air - and high up on the sixth floor Mom would lean out the window to shout imprecations and instructions (once knocking the screen out of its frame and we all watched as it sailed slowly out and down to land thump! in the parking lot..)..
Two fish memories. (No Indian memories that I recall - though the city's illustrious name is enshrined in "Native Person" lore (ugh!) as we all know (didn't you know? Pity! For all my bad grades in school, I sometimes think I retained a lot. Mostly just the trivia, though, I will be first to concede), "Meeting place of the skunks" or some such.
But the fish: first - I found a carved wooden fish mold once on the beach. You could pack wet sand in it and turn it over and out would fall a fine fat sand fish, complete with scales, tail, fins and bulging eyes. I took great delight in covering the beach with molded sand fishes, and regret to this day the loss (somewhere) of my wood mold borne into me one fine day by the itinerant winds of Lake Michigan from who knows what distant and romantic shore (maybe even in the roundabout way Fate has, all the way from the "Shores of Gitche Gumee", via the Mackinac Straits. Gitchee Gumee (And if you open this delightful site, be sure to go down to the part about "...the mittens inside outside, etc".... one of my favorite parts, and obviously not the version of the lamentation that is said to have made Lincoln in the White House weep when Longfellow's great epic was read to him!). LOL! You knew we would get Injuns in here sooner or later, right? (I guess at this point in my narrative here, if I were to go belly up, I would sigh and whisper, as the cameras zoom-shot in, "Rosebud!" as my slimy, wet, wooden mold slips idly from my failing grasp. Up lights! Cameras! Action!).
Second - The Shedd Aquarium. Fins Are Where It's At! In those days it was a large, shining white building right on Lake Shore and you went into the dark gloom inside and all these giant glass tanks with their dim green light and monstrous fishes from all the world's oceans gaping and blowing bubbles at you from the other side of the glass. I never failed to be transfixed. In fish (somehow) lies the secret of the world...
I shall develop this notion further in just a moment, but right now we are about to leave Chicago - after all we only lived there six months. And one more anecdote beckons... For Pop had yet another run-in with the hoodlum world. Sort of. Maybe more like a drive-by or (best!) a drive-away, perhaps. For, as he told it years later, he was driving down the old Boul' Mich', maybe I guess it was - wherever - one afternoon, and he said "I suddenly heard a rat-a-tat-tat somewhere in traffic behind me".
Texas is a whole 'nuther place, you know. You better know!
So Pop looked up at his rear view mirror just in time to see an entire store front go out of a building behind him in an explosion of glass. He needed no further urging to step on the gas and get out of there! It turned out later that what he had maybe beheld was a gangland shootout a la Dion O'Bannion style - which in later years he seemed to relate as best I recall, as THE actual shootout of same - but as Dion went out in a blaze of glory and slugs in 1924, in his flower shop on the North Side, what Pop saw must have been yet another nameless rubout: Chicago did not lack for hoods in that day! Anyhow - we don't want to go there right now... (As this dude, Emeril the Chef says on TV nowadays when pushed too far to "explain" some nuance of his recipes...). Actually, the hoods were good business for Pop: as I said earlier, he was a Branch Manager for GMAC, the times-sales end of General Motors, and many of the Chicago office's customers were well-heeled guys in low fedoras and deep-pockets overcoats who bought custom Buicks and Cady's "like bananas (as Pop used to say) in bunches" - often stipulating customizing at the factory, like steel boilerplate be hung out of sight in the window wells of the side doors...
And so one night not long after all these sordid affairs, Pop came home and announced: "We've been transferred again! Back to...Dallas!"
"I had never heard a machine gun before," he added, "but I knew the sound of one when I did!" (As late maybe as 1940, when I was a freshman enrolled in high school ROTC in Amarillo, TX, we were taught to shoot Thompson Machine Guns in the armory range (on the school grounds!) and they were still being called "Chicago Pianos" even then... WHAT! I hear the most of you screaming, "You fired sub-machine guns in high school? And on public school grounds?" Yep! 'S God's Truth, but of that all in due course, My Pretties! All in due course...