Big Mike: What Are You Rebelling Against?

I was born and raised in a little neighborhood called Galewood, part of the larger, officially recognized Austin neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side. The residents of Galewood were Italian, Polish, Irish and Greek, with a Jew or two for good measure.  The men of Galewood were more white-collar than not - plant managers, insurance men, elementary school principals and so on. The women stayed home to vacuum.

We had a politician or two who lived nearby as well, including Benjamin Adamowski, former Cook County State's Attorney who challenged Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1963 election, and Edward V. Hanrahan, another State's Attorney, who led the terror squad that whacked Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

There were no blacks in Galewood. But the place was lousy with Outfit characters, from upper-echelon bosses to low-level juice loan collectors.

My old man, a shipping/receiving dock foreman, and my mother, a vacuumer, lucked their way into Galewood. Looking to buy their first home in the 1950s, they happened upon a comfortable bungalow on Natchez Avenue owned by an ancient dowager named Mrs. Alstead. Not sophisticated enough to squeeze every last penny out of her home, she offered it for a good deal less than $20,000. Ma and Dad snapped it up.

Even at that bargain-basement price, the house was too rich for my father's meager salary so Ma had to go to work, first at a sandpaper company, gluing abrasives onto heavy-gauge cards while I floated blissfully in her womb, later for Frank's Dime Store, and then for Sears. To this day, she brags about her magical way with money. She relies on a tried-and-true series of old financial saws guaranteed to make the eyes of her children roll like pinballs:

• I robbed Peter to pay Paul
  
• I made a penny do the work of a dime.
  
• I struggled to make ends meet.
  

When I was very young, I heard that last adage as "make ennsmeat," which I assumed was some old country dish that she didn't feel like preparing anymore.

Sadly, in part because Ma was a pecuniary tyrant, I rebelled and became a profligate spender. Oh, I won't blame all my debtor woes on her; I possess, after all, a wide streak of compulsive narcissism. But one of my primary goals in life has been to show Ma that actually buying stuff isn't fatal.

My Galewood neighbors attempted to impart many other lessons to me. Here's a compendium of Galewood's philosophies on black people:

• They wreck everything we give them.
  
• They're comin' after our daughters.
  
• Martin Luther King speaks with a forked tongue.
  
• JFK (or LBJ or any national Democrat) is a nigger-lover.
  
• The White Sox lose because they have too many niggers.
  
• They don't want to work.
  
• Better watch out or they'll take over.
  

Even as a dopey kid, I couldn't figure out how a group that didn't like to work would have the ambition or capability to "take over."

Galewood's actions were as alarming as its words. When, for instance, Ma refused to participate in an anti-busing school boycott, our house was showered with raw eggs. And after King's assassination, I took a schoolyard ass-beating after objecting to the prevailing opinion that he'd gotten what he'd deserved.

As mentioned here in previous posts, I had a hard time washing myself clean of Galewood's racial muck. Even though I mourned King's death and was outraged by those of Hampton and Clark, I still found myself uttering slurs now and again. It took me years to free myself of even unintentional racial loathing.

I compare my own growth in this matter to that of the nation's. Sure, we've elected a partially black man as president. Yet, as the inane "tea parties" of the past week demonstrated, we're not totally free of racial fear.

Too many people bandied placards and words decrying our new "tyranny" and comparing Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler. They aren't just suggesting that taxation or government spending programs are the moral equivalent of the Holocaust or Saddam's gassing of the Kurds.

It's more cryptic than that. I suspect the "tea party" right-wingers are not as devoted to Ma's brand of thrift as they are enslaved to Galewood's old fears that "They'll take over."

The tea party-ites still have a lot of racial muck to wash off.

Big Mike: Stupidity Is A Tough Stain To Rub Out

Here's a personal story in honor of the recent anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination.

Growing up in an absolutely segregated neighborhood - Galewood on Chicago's Northwest Side - I never went to school with a black kid until my freshman year of high school. Even then, out of a class of some 250, only two were black.

One was named Dennis, from Maywood. He was the nerdiest character in the world. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and spoke in a precise King's English that would make Steve Urkell look like Jadakiss. He had no interest whatsoever in sports, frustrating the hell out of the school's football and basketball coaches who hounded him daily to try out for their teams. They simply couldn't wrap their brains around a young black man who wasn't a wide receiver or a point guard.

Dennis and I partnered up in Fr. Motl's speech class the first week of school. Fr. Motl felt that the first asset a public speaker should have was the ability to remember people's names. So he instructed us to create a set of mnemonics for each other. In this way, Dennis and I got to know each other and we became the fastest of friends, as 14-year-olds are wont to do.

I forget the name of the other black kid in my class because his time at Fenwick was so short. Let's call him Luke. He was tall, strong, and rangy. The football and basketball staffs had stood on their heads to recruit him from the time he was in sixth grade. He was the greyhound they expected every human of dark complexion to be.

By November, whenever Luke passed a coach in the hall, the coach would gaze upon him as if he were a prized poodle. When Dennis walked past them, they simply shook their heads.

Dennis and Luke had nothing to do with each other since their interests were so wildly divergent. Dennis had joined the debate and forensics team, for pity's sake! This mystified most of their classmates who wondered aloud why these two black guys wouldn't even sit together in the cafeteria.

They didn't have to wonder too long because Luke failed most of his classes the first semester, going on probation. After he failed most of his second semester classes, his scholarship was rescinded and he transferred to a West Suburban hoops powerhouse. I remember reading his name in the papers time and again.

I never read about Dennis in the papers even though he eventually graduated near the top of our class. Things have changed a lot since I was in high school but one thing hasn't: today more Americans know who Plaxico Burress is than Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I wish I could say that Dennis and I celebrated our graduation together. By that time, though, we were no longer friends.

I'd fallen in with a tough crowd that didn't attend Fenwick, which was ironic considering the fact that my parents had scraped their pennies together to send me to the private school just to keep me away from the neighborhood's bad element. We drank booze and fought and passed ourselves off as gangbangers. After every weekend, I couldn't wait to get back to school to show my high-toned classmates what a hoodlum I was becoming.

One day during sophomore year, on the stairway between classes, some poor freshman accidentally bumped into me. I was compelled to set him straight. I put him up against the wall and told him I'd fuck him up with a nigger-knife. See, I'd just learned the definition of the term in my impromptu street classes around Amundsen Park: in an alley fight, a guy who's too poor to own a nice switchblade has to use a broken bottle to achieve the same end. Ergo, nigger-knife.

The kid was duly petrified and I let him loose as though I now owned a significant portion of the world. I might have begun to strut down those stairs save for one thing - Dennis had sneaked up behind me to say hello just before the incident. He'd heard the whole thing. He froze me with a disgusted look. He never said another word to me the rest of our time at Fenwick.

I've related similar tales in these pages and elsewhere. I had to learn my lessons about racial sensitivity time and again. Even though I revered King, Julian Bond, Andrew Young, and even Dick Allen and Marvin Gaye, I still had a vestigial stink of bigotry within me.

It wasn't easy to wash myself clean of the influence of my all-white neighborhood. I'd still lapse into using slurs into my early 20s. It's a lot easier to remain stupid than to grow.

This whole thing came back to me because the other day All-American Bob and I had a debate at Dick's Pizza about affirmative action. All-American Bob said, "Isn't it time we dropped all this silliness? It's over. The fight's finished. They won the battle. They've got a black man as President. Let's move on."

A lot of people probably would agree with him. Few would notice, though, that he repeatedly referred to black Americans - his fellow citizens - as they. It ain't so easy just to move on.

Big Mike: Franny's Life

Written Saturday, February 21, 2009

Good old Franny. My sis. Died a little more than a year ago. A day like today makes me think of her.

It's windy, snowy, and cold. The lawns are turning white. Louisville drivers are slipping and sliding all over the road as well as any environs within 30 yards of the pavement. Franny loved winter. This weather would have made her smile. She'd wrap herself in a comforter, slip an old movie into the DVD player, and act as though she were appearing in a Swiss Miss cocoa commercial.

I, on the other hand, despise winter worse than all the other ills that have plagued humankind since the dawn of recorded history. I'd tell Franny that I dream of moving to California so I won't have to put up with snow and ice and the hour and half of daylight of a typical January day. I'd tell her I crave spring and summer.

"Oh no," Franny would say. "You can't really enjoy spring unless you've experienced winter." Which, to me, is like saying I can't wait to serve a 10-year prison sentence because I'll be elated the day I'm released.

Franny took her pleasures wherever and whenever she could. She came from that generation of women who were, well, screwed by society and the times. She was born in 1938 and attended St. Giles elementary school and Notre Dame high school for girls. She was the kind of schoolgirl the nuns loved to hate. Sassy, rebellious, free with her opinions, she listened as more than a few nuns predicted a dire future for her. The women of the habit were certain she was on a one-way ride to cigarette-smoking, hot-rod-riding, liquor-guzzling, girl-gang membership, and, for all I know, membership in the communist party.

Funny thing was, they weren't so far off the mark. She was among the first of her peers to light up, go drag racing down North Avenue near Skip's Fiesta Drive-In, and drink alcohol. She didn't join a girl gang only because she couldn't find any. As for the communist party, she didn't care one way or the other.

Despite her teenaged moral turpitude, Franny got married when she was 20 to a nice boy named Bob. All Bob wanted was a comfortable home and the company of scads of children. By the time Franny was 24, she and Bob had four of them. They added another four years later.

With enough progeny to field a basketball team, Franny entered the 1970s harried, exhausted, and feeling a profound sense of emptiness. She was smart and ambitious enough to have gone to college and made a career for herself. But that option was as anathema to her neighborhood and the nuns who schooled her as if she'd become the Premier of the Soviet Union. Maybe worse.

Franny yearned to be well-read. She began to admire Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, women who spoke up and did things. She found herself disgusted by the Vietnam War and racism. Only she was too busy wiping snotty noses to do anything about them.

When bright, accomplished women who were five and ten years younger appeared on TV, women who were able to take advantage of all the new freedoms of the era, Franny would sigh audibly. She wanted so much more than what she had.

Eventually, that longing morphed into a desire for change of any kind, no matter the repercussions. And believe me, there were repercussions when she took a part-time job as a bartender at The Foxy Lady on Madison Street to help pay the mortgage on a new home. The bar was in Chicago's all-black West Side. One night, a man named Julian walked into the joint as Stevie Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" played on the jukebox. Franny fell for him instantly.

Oh yeah, repercussions. Her affair with Julian cost her a husband, much of her childhood family, most of her friends, her neighborhood, and quite nearly her life. Soon after Julian had moved in with Franny on Marmora Avenue just off Grand Avenue, her home was shot up with high-powered rifles. It's 50/50 whether the shooters were local racists turned rabid by the presence of a black man on the block or the kin of the wife Julian had left behind in Cabrini-Green.

Franny and Julian got married across the street from City Hall in 1978 by a preacher wearing a white suit, white shoes, and a wide brimmed white hat with an enormous red feather in it. His "chapel," a cramped, dusty office in a building slated to be demolished, was wall-papered with aluminum foil and had immense pictures of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the front wall. A hidden tape deck played Marvin Gaye in the background. I was the best man.

Julian was gone by 1981. In the weirdest of ironies, he excelled in every vice that Franny's appalled, petrified family and friends had told her black men were known for. Franny never let on that he was a drunk, a philanderer, couldn't hold a job, and that he punched her like Sugar Ray Leonard when she displeased him. She never wanted them to think that they'd been right. She even hid it all from me.

She somehow rid herself of Julian even after he'd held her hostage at knifepoint one harrowing night. After that, Franny swore she was finished with men. She devoted the rest of her life to her kids and grandkids. She baked pies, cakes, and cookies enough to feed armies. She worked for days to prepare seafood gumbo, fried calamari, shrimp scampi, caponata, homemade bread and more on Christmas Eve and lasagna, ham, and lamb on Easter. She spent every dime she had on presents. Anybody who wanted could stay overnight. She was atoning.

When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer six years ago, she began to wonder if there's a heaven. If there is, I hope it's windy, snowy, and cold for her.