The bus creaks away from the curb and peg-legs its way further down into the enfolded heart of Chicago’s South Side. The No. 8 has dropped Corey off on the northwest corner of Fibs and Teeth Street’s commercially unsound
intersection, in the steely-nerved neighborhood of Hardscrabble. Watching the bus as it distances itself from her, she notices that some wisecracker has etched an alternative refrain to Hughie Cannon’s ragtime classic into the soot covering the bus’ rear: "Won’t you come home, Rich Daley,
won’t you come home."
Placing a Menthol 100 between her lips, she begins to work at its
end with her Zippo lighter. The plastic grocery bag that has acted
as her briefcase for the past few weeks swings like a spastic pendulum
from the wrist of the hand she’s using to shield the unresponsive lighter from the steady mellow breeze. A dragonfly darts into her peripheral vision and remains, undulating there close enough so that the sound of its wispy wings is heard over the intersection’s traffic.
The Zippo is out of fluid.
Sufficiently annoyed, Corey takes a back-handed swing at the dragonfly with her briefcase hand. One of the plastic bag’s handles rips away from her wrist, and out of the bag comes flying these items: the electric and gas bills to her home, her checkbook, the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books, an apple and a crustless ham and margarine sandwich. Of course, she came nowhere close to nailing the hovering pest.
As the fallen items come to rest in South Teeth’s gutter, Corey feels the day’s humidity creep up over her shoulders like a plasticized plague. Biting down on the unlit cigarette, a sharp pain shoots from a lower molar up through her left temple. She has just been dropped off from an emergency visit to the dentist. This morning she had her first ever root canal. Pissed at the pain, she spits the Menthol 100 to the sidewalk.
A bead of sweat falls from her right eyebrow into the shallow cup of a bi-focal lens. She grunts off-handedly. She pockets her Zippo, removes the green-framed eyeglasses from her face, and pulls an end of her janitor-blue rayon shirt out from under the thick black belt gripping her Khakis to her foxy hips. Her Khakis are floods, and one can see a couple of inches of her fresh white socks between the bottom of the Khakis’ legs and her 5-year-old Doc Martens. You can’t take the punk out of the girl, and this is made ever the more evident by her plum-dyed, short-cropped mussed up hair, and by her youthful skin, which has never found sunlight to be anything other than boring. She’s a cool middle-ager.
While wiping off the lens of her eyeglasses she hears two quick beeps of a car horn, and then hears a lady’s scruffy voice cry out, “C’mon ass, let’s move it!” Looking up, her near-sighted eyes capture a blurred instance of useless aggression, wherein an apparently shiny and aerodynamic compact car peels out and whips around a seemingly rust-spotted
pick-up truck whose bed—overflowing with tall, bulky objects—is idling around the corner to head westward on Fibs.
Corey returns the eyeglasses to her face, and tucks her shirt back into her pants. She looks at the slow-moving pick-up and sees that it is indeed spotted with rust. As well, she sees that the objects in its large bed are in fact refrigerators. The off-white, round-edged refrigerator that’s facing out from the very back of the pick-up’s bed is missing its door. From not too far off in the distance behind her comes the screeching of tires from a car attempting a desperate stop. Corey imagines—actually hopes—the screeching tires belong to the lady that cursed at the rusty pick-up. She says aloud to herself, “Bam!” but is disappointed when the screeching ends without the exclamation of crunching metal.
Beyond the pick-up, looming over the near southwest suburbs, are the deeply bruised clouds of a storm that will no doubt be encroaching upon the city within the next hour. Corey takes the remaining plastic handle off of her wrist, and then ties the halves of the ripped handle together in a knot. Turning around to go and gather her belongings out of South Teeth’s gutter, she is confronted by the sight of one of Hardscrabble’s resident alcoholics.
There is a group of alcoholics in Hardscrabble who have found safe haven in a flophouse just west of Teeth around Hearsay Place. By night these alcoholics break into local businesses and homes; and by day one can find them drinking in the doorways that surround Hardscrabble Liquors. On any given afternoon in the summertime one can find an ambulance at the curb outside Hardscrabble Liquors, and see paramedics working on the latest black-out victim.
Unfortunately, these alcoholics have through the decades become enmeshed within the everyday chemistry of Hardscrabble. It is this fact that makes it very easy for the folks of Hardscrabble to not think about mobilizing and kicking them out for keeps, or mobilizing and seeing to it that they get the mental and physical rehabilitation they urgently need. To the folks of Hardscrabble, these alcoholics are better off ignored—better off marginalized to the backburner of the neighborhood’s immediate reality.
These alcoholics are Corey’s greatest nemeses, for they and their intoxicants often hangout around the Hardscrabble Branch of the Chicago Public Library, which is fifty yards north of the liquor store, and which is Corey’s place of employment. One might think that it is because she spends time each week shooing them away from the library that she knows each by his or her nickname, but the truth is that Corey is herself a Hardscrabbler, born and raised, and so she knows most of them from growing up in the neighborhood. Corey has had many daydreams of single-handedly removing these alcoholics from Hardscrabble. Within these daydreams the alcoholics put up great resistance, but alas, this is Corey’s
mind—no foe stands a chance against the overpowering violence she is capable of within her own head.
Corey watches as the alcoholic begins to bend over and reach out for the fallen sandwich. “So help me God, if you touch that sandwich I will tear the veins out of your skin!” Corey yells at her. And as the addict quickly looks up she loses her balance, stumbling backwards and planting her ass in the gutter, right on top of The New York Review of Books.
She steps into the gutter and grabs her bills, her checkbook, and the sandwich. She puts the items into the grocery bag, and then she picks up the apple that’s now embedded with gravel and shards of glass, and she lobs it into the corner’s trash can. She looks down at the alcoholic. The puffed pallor of the alcoholic’s face barely betrays a past angular beauty. An oily ball cap is squeezed down on her apparently shaven red head, its frayed bill is off to the side. Though it’s a hot July day, she is dressed in a full-body mechanic’s jump-suit—the odor emanating from the suit is purely schizophrenic.
Bunching the handles of the plastic bag into the grip of her hand, Corey realizes that she does not immediately recognize this alcoholic. She appears to be a new one, an outsider, though there is
something about her eyes that rings way too familiar to Corey. The alcoholic’s eyes harbor a distinct rebelliousness, and Corey is immediately convinced that she’s known these unapologetic spheres in the past.
click player, listen, read on
She stares a bit more at the alcoholic before it dawns on her: the person in the gutter now staring quizzically back up at her is Ophelia Sway Avila, her first love. In high school she and Sway (Ophelia's always gone by her middle name) spent their lives together disdaining social allegiances, and percolating a mutual fondness for the various disciplines of delinquency. After graduating from high school, she and Sway shared a tiny studio apartment on Chicago’s North Side, where they each attended DePaul University and lived together like a financially struggling married couple—classes in the day, each working part-time gigs a few evenings during the week. They were in love throughout their college years, and during the year after college, which they spent as ex-pats in Prague, reading existential novels and learning the heights to which futility will venture for its revelations. However, when they returned from Europe and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Hardscrabble their lives began to take very different paths. Corey, ever the pragmatist, became a Library Associate, and attended graduate courses in the Loop for her MLIS. Sway, ever the romantic,
lost herself in the underground art culture, and promptly embraced an intensely deconstructive lifestyle.
Corey was there for Sway’s one and only reading, even though it took place a full year and a half after Sway walked away from their relationship, and even though Corey had by that time walked down the Catholic aisle. The reading was a result of the self-illustrated chapbook An Epitaph Grows Out of Hardscrabble, which was published by an indie outfit called Bohemian Pupil Press. An Epitaph Grows Out of Hardscrabble intrigued many small press critics, yet being a work with poetic endeavors it of course bombed in the marketplace.
Shortly after her reading, Sway disappeared—fell off the planet. Even her own family has had no idea of where to find her. A year or so back there was a feature article in a popular literary webzine that established An Epitaph Grows Out of Hardscrabble as a minor masterpiece, and then attempted to uncover Sway’s whereabouts and the reasoning behind her sudden withdrawal from the literary scene. The article’s
esteemed author surmised that Ophelia Sway Avila went off to Europe,
where she would be today living the life of a recluse, creating stunning poetry to be published posthumously. But really, no one has been able say with any certainty what’s become of her—if she is dead or alive. So, as one might guess, her chapbook has become a widely discussed enigma within the underground literary world, and the dozen or so signed editions that are out there are each now worth quite a bit of cash.
“I ain’t here to apologize, Core,” Sway finally says.
Corey doesn’t know how to respond. She does, however, notice that her old lover’s voice has not been weathered by age, and remains a delicate and palpable soother. Corey opens her mouth a bit, but her tongue remains still. Only her heavy breath moves beyond her lips.
“I’ve zeroed in on a tombstone,” Sway admits, thus beginning her monologue. “A rectangular, waist-high polished slab of rose-colored marble with my name and the years
I lived engraved above the engraving of a stanza and a poet’s name. The stanza: ‘He has joy, but joy is a trick in the air; and pleasure, but pleasure is contemptible; / And peace; and is based on solider than pain. / He has broken boundaries a little and that will estrange him; he is monstrous, but not / To the measure of the God. … But I having told you— / However I suppose that few in the world have energy to hear effectively— / Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the people.’ … The poet: Robinson Jeffers.
“That would say it all for me, right there. Remember this, Core; it’s all I want left of me. …
“Did you read the paper this morning? Did you hear about that kid blowing his friend’s face off with some lost and found gun, and then afterwards telling his mother how he believes human life is more or less an offspring of Nintendo? Didn’t you read the news, Core? ...
“Just what did you think would become of me? ... There was no vision; I never had any vision. All I ever did – all I could ever do – was only look inside of me. Let me tell you something, Core, it’s no fun when you discover that your so-called gift has done nothing but driven you deeper away from the ideas of home and empathy, and has emptied you of humility. That’s no field trip discovering that. That’s just plain frightening. But, I ain’t here to apologize. No. I’m sorry ...”
The terrible shriek of a truck’s worn-out breaks has cut Sway off. Sway uses this time to bring herself to a wobbly stand within the gutter. Once standing, she continues on, stating a bit angrily, “A bullet is sounder than a daydream, but that isn’t the real point, Core. When imagination dies, so too does God—the barriers between good and bad, right and wrong, are destroyed. When reality takes over the role of imagination you have today: Nintendo.”
Corey finally speaks up: “What do you want me to say,
Sway? What, it’s almost twenty years now, and all of the sudden you need me to make sense of you? You always knew where to find me. You’re the one that disappeared from me. You’re the magic act here, so don’t try to twist this around, and make it out like I’m the illusion. ... Christ, look at you, Sway. Look at that body of yours shaking.”
They stare each other down for a few moments. Corey searches Sway’s eyes for honesty; Sway searches Corey’s eyes for acceptance. Then, Sway holds out her hand to Corey.
Corey finally takes her eyes away from Sway’s and begins to pace the gutter’s curb. She gives herself over to the
choices at hand, and while doing so she becomes the inhibitor of that crude space between justification and action. She recalls the deep compassion that Sway’s friendship had always offered her. Stopping mid-stride, she envisions herself in a graveyard, standing
with a gun before the tombstone that Sway had just described to her.
She imagines emptying the gun’s bullets into the tombstone, rendering the poet's stanza indecipherable.
Corey reaches into her pocket, and pulls out a bill. While closing a skyward palm around the twenty, Sway uses her free hand to point to her own eye, then to her own heart, and then straight at Corey. While doing this she lip-syncs in an exaggerated manner, and in unison with where she is pointing, I-love-you.
Fireworks begin going off in the distance, signaling the start of a rare White Sox’s mid-week afternoon ballgame. Corey herself understands that words need not be further exchanged between them. As she turns away and looks up to the still clear sky above her, the fuzzy echo of a cheering crowd reaches the intersection of Fibs and Teeth. Grinning sadly at the momentous expanse above her, Corey shatters her own conscience with the wink of an eye. …
Soon, as she’s opening the door to the Hardscrabble Branch of
the Chicago Public Library, she will be entirely unaware that a full
block and a half down from her, on the sidewalk directly in front of
the boarded-up and dilapidated facade to the Jaromil Theatre, a
troubled young adult will be listening to one of his grandfather’s memories. The memory will involve a childhood sweetheart and a semi-classic movie, neither of which the grandfather will be able to put a name to on this day. But the gist of the memory will be there for him to purvey, and his tale of innocent mischievousness will work a small miracle, occasioning enough curiosity in the antisocial grandson to keep his eyes from wandering downward and spotting a loose twenty-dollar bill on its southbound tumble.
