Читать книгу Chicago Stories - Growing Up In the Windy City - Thomas Walsh - Страница 4

Tim often recalled his experiences as a paperboy. Cold winter days always brought those memories to mind. He had frostbitten several of his fingers rolling papers as he worked his paper route. Temperatures below freezing turned those fingers numb and painful, taking him back…

Tim was a paperboy for several years. First he had an afternoon paper route after school. He delivered the afternoon newspapers, The Chicago Daily News and Chicago’s American from the paper barn on Clark Street on his bicycle. He delivered to homes and apartments in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago’s north side just west of the Uptown area. It took some time and a number of spills to learn how to steer and balance the bike with dozens of papers stuffed in a large canvas sack balanced on the handlebars. The older boys, like Tim’s brothers before him, became so good at balancing their bikes that they could roll and throw papers from their bikes as they pedaled.

When boys grew up, usually around age 10-12 depending on their size and maturity, they moved up to morning paper routes. Morning routes were larger with many more papers. Consequently, they paid better and offered better opportunities for Christmas tips. Papers were stacked in large three wheeled push carts, with some routes having over 300 Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribunes to deliver. Boys had to be big and strong to push the carts when they were fully loaded, especially in the winter with snow and slush to plow through.

The paper barn was a small building where newspaper trucks delivered hundreds of bundles of papers. The paper delivery business, Murphy’s, broke the bundles down and sorted them by paper route in stacks on a waist high shelf along the inside walls of the building. Beside each route’s stack of papers hung a metal ring with small paper cards listing the names and addresses of the delivery customers and the paper(s) they subscribed to. The cards were arranged in the order of the suggested layout of the paper route, which most of the boys followed in their daily deliveries. After a while though, many boys knew their routes by heart and only referred to the cards when there was a change notice attached to the ring. The paperboys were expected to be at the barn to load their bikes or push carts no later than 4:00 pm if it was an afternoon route and 5:00 am for a morning route.

Tim’s first morning route was along a number of nice streets in the Ravenswood neighborhood like Paulina and Hermitage. In the early 1960’s these were wide streets with spacious lawns and majestic elms that spanned the streets forming a canopy like a massive knave in a cathedral. There was a mixture of elegant old clapboard homes and tidy red brick and yellow brick (or Cream City Brick as it was called), apartment buildings with everything from 2 and 3 flats to 18 or 24 apartments or more.

One morning in mid-December, Tim pushed his cart through a few inches of freshly fallen snow. It was a cold morning. The snow crunched beneath his feet as he rolled the paper cart along the sidewalk. The streetlights cast broad circles of light on the street, parked cars and part of the sidewalk. Soft puffs of snow floated through the light as it blew off the arm of the streetlight and nearby tree branches. In between the circles of light were stretches of dark pierced by occasional light from the front porch of a house or a lamp at the entrance to an apartment building. A feeling of solitude enveloped Tim like a warm blanket in the cold. He was a quiet kid, introspective for his age, who sometimes found solace in his thoughts.

Most of the papers delivered to apartment buildings were thrown on porches in the back of the buildings. This often meant walking through dark gangways on the sides of the buildings. These passageways were like tunnels from the front to the back of a building. Gangways were the only way to go from the front to the back when buildings were constructed right up to the lot lines. Tim hated walking through a gangway because he was afraid of what the dark might hold. To get up his courage he hummed or sang softly as he entered and walked through a gangway.

Tim was big for a preteen, but he still had the pudgy face and body of a boy raised to always clean his plate at mealtime. He had not yet developed muscles and agility like his older brothers, who were three and six years older than him. He was the baby in an Irish family; doted on by his mother. This had made him softer than he should have been. Throwing papers up to the first or second floor was not a problem for Tim, but occasionally there was a third floor porch he couldn’t make; a porch that was either too high, or along the side of a building with no space to get an angle for a good throw. On Sundays, the problem was made worse by the increased size of the papers. For these third floors he had no choice but to walk up to the landing between the second and third floor and toss the paper up to the third floor.

The week before Tim had distributed Christmas calendars to his customers. This was the traditional way to indirectly solicit holiday tips. Tim had gone around to his customers at dinner time to increase the odds of them being home. A one dollar tip was common, sometimes two, and very rarely five dollars was given. Occasionally there was no tip or thank you, or no answer at the door even though people were home. Tim quickly learned that people who appeared to have less than others often gave more generously. If no one was home or there was no answer, Tim left a calendar by the door with a Christmas card in the hope the customer would send him a tip in the mail.

Tim came around to the back of an apartment building with a high third floor he knew he could not reach from the walk. There were papers to be delivered on the all three floors. He trudged up the stairs. As he passed the second floor on the way up to the next landing he glanced down to his right into a lighted kitchen. A woman was rummaging through her purse at the kitchen table. Tim reached the landing and tossed the last paper up to the third floor. He turned around and began back down the stairs.

When he reached the second floor, the woman in the lighted kitchen cracked her back door and said, “Oh paperboy, please wait a minute I have something I want to give you. Please come in out of the cold.”

Tim knew this was a customer who was not home when he had made his rounds with Christmas calendars. She seemed friendly enough so he stepped into her kitchen. She closed the door behind him. He felt a little nervous and self-conscious standing in the woman’s kitchen all bundled up in his winter clothing.

The kitchen was similar to the one in the apartment he lived in. A small room with an old off-white gas stove with four burners, a small off-white Frigidaire refrigerator, and an off-white sink with a built in drain board. The floor was dull, worn linoleum. In the middle of the kitchen floor was a small dinette set like the ones advertised by Polk Brothers, a popular discount furniture and appliance store. It was a shiny metal trimmed table with four metal frame chairs with plastic covered seat cushions and backs.

The woman had turned to her purse on the table. She was dressed in a robe over a nightgown with fluffy slippers on her feet. Being a preteen, Tim was very interested in what women and girls were really all about, but in a shy, awkward way. He cast a furtive glance at the woman noticing that she was very shapely under her night clothes. She had deep black hair, rich cream colored skin and a pretty face with a slightly turned up nose which gave her a youthful look.

He thought she must be quite a bit younger than his mother, but quite a bit older than his sister who was 20 years old. His glance turned into a stare as he wondered what she looked like under her clothes.

As she closed her purse she said, “I am sorry I missed you when you left the calendar. I want to give you this present for Christmas.” She turned quickly and caught Tim staring at her body. A soft smile formed on her lips as she held out a five dollar bill to Tim. Startled at being caught staring, Tim dropped the bill on the floor. He knelt on one knee to pick it up. When he stood up, the woman had let her robe fall open to expose a sheer nightgown. Tim stared uncontrollably at two full breasts with erect nipples pushing up the sheer material of the nightgown.

She reached out and gently stroked his cheek and said, “Have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year.” She dropped her hand to his shoulder and turned Tim to the door which she reached around and opened. Tim walked through the doorway in a daze without even thanking the woman or wishing her a Merry Christmas.

Tim knew he should have said something to the woman, but he was struck dumb by seeing her body. He wanted to brag to his pals about what he had seen. But, he was afraid they would tease him about being too young to know what to do with her. He decided to keep the memory of the round, full breasts and hard nipples to himself. The memory came to mind frequently at first, raising a hard-on in his pants, which he enjoyed and cherished as a sign of his coming manhood. Tim thought less about the woman as he grew older, but every Christmas her memory brought pleasant thoughts to mind.

The men who ran Murphy’s, the paper distribution business, were named Mickey and Peter. They were two very different individuals. Mickey was friendly and talkative with a pot belly, close cropped curly hair and a ruddy complexion. He always looked disheveled and in a constant state of motion. Peter was reserved and spoke sparingly. He dressed neatly and maintained a trim physique with neatly combed hair. Peter measured his actions and always seemed to be in control of a situation. The boys all loved Mickey because he was easy going and likeable. He looked out for the boys and they knew they could trust him. Peter, who seemed distant and unfriendly to the boys, was respected by the boys but they did not love him.

Mickey ran the distribution side of the business. He supervised the paperboys, delivery and the paper barns. There was a second barn in the Uptown neighborhood east of Broadway. Once the paperboys were out on their routes Mickey cruised around in a small beat-up red truck that said Murphy’s Newspaper Delivery on the side, checking on the paperboys to make sure there were no problems Peter looked after administrative matters and handled calls from customers about no paper delivery, broken windows and such. He usually stayed around the small office in the main barn.

Tim’s family moved to an apartment east of Clark Street in Uptown. It was the only area still in Our Lady of Lourdes Parish where his parents could find a larger apartment for rent they could afford. Tim asked Mickey if he could change to a morning paper route that started in the paper barn in Uptown, which was closer to his new home. He didn’t have long to wait. Murphy’s had trouble keeping paperboys in the Uptown neighborhood.

The Uptown area once known for large, gracious homes and roomy apartments had become a mecca for poor white people from Appalachian states like Tennessee and Kentucky. These people from rural areas and small towns in Appalachia were poor, uneducated and unskilled. They were looking for factory and construction jobs in the big cities of the north like Chicago. They were derogatorily referred to as “Hillbillies”.

Real estate speculators had bought up many homes and apartments in Uptown, and subdivided them into as many units as the law would allow. Investors bought the chopped-up properties to take advantage of the flood of poor people from Appalachia who needed a place to live. These buildings were easy to pick out. In good weather the front porches or stoops were full of young women with sallow skin and drawn, unhappy faces, surrounded by packs of babies and young children. Junk cars were usually parked in front. Cars were status symbols to the men. Automobiles were the first thing they would buy when they scraped together some money for a down payment. In their spare time the men worked on the cars in front of the apartment buildings in their overalls and wife beater T-shirts.

Many of the people who migrated from Appalachia became homesick, and unhappy with low paying jobs, high rents, squalid living conditions and bitterly cold winters. Drunkenness, wife beatings, robberies, violence and murders were rampant in Uptown. Bars, pool halls and other unsavory establishments blossomed in the area. Sordid characters were drawn to it by the opportunities to commit crimes.

Tim was soon assigned a new morning route in Uptown: one of the largest routes in Murphy’s distribution territory. It extended from Broadway east through some of the worst tenement areas in Uptown to expensive homes and apartments along Sheridan Road. In the tough areas Tim kept a wary eye on men he did not recognize. After a while he recognized the men who were usually hanging around between 5:00 am and 7:00 am. If there was a man he did not recognize he stopped his push cart and busied himself rolling papers until the person passed and went a comfortable distance. Occasionally, a bum or wino would hide and wait for Tim to head into a building to try to steal papers from the cart. If this happened too often in a particular area, Mickey would track the down the thief and administer a lesson that assured there would be no further trouble.

One summer morning Tim was pushing his cart down a street just west of Sheridan Road. He crossed an intersection and tilted the front of the cart up on the run to make it easier to lift the back wheels of the cart over the curb and onto the sidewalk. The metal strips on the bottom of the wheels made a grinding sound against the dry concrete sidewalk. The sun was nearly up. The sky was clear. It was already warm. He could tell it would be a hot day.

Tim stopped to gather papers to deliver to a large apartment building. As he bent over the push cart he noticed out of the side of his eye that there was a man about 50 feet behind him at the corner of the intersection he had just crossed. The man had stopped. He seemed to be watching him. Tim turned his head to look at the man. Even in the half light of dawn he could tell the man was not a bum or wino. If it was a bum or a wino, they would usually duck away and wait for a better opportunity to steal some papers unnoticed. The man did not turn away. He looked nervous and shuffled his feet. He was not dressed like a bum in soiled and disheveled clothes. He seemed normal, except he was unshaven and had dark deep-set eyes, which he cast to the ground when Tim looked at him. Tim thought about what to do next, then much to his relief the man walked off down the side street.

Tim continued working his way down the block. He had an uneasy feeling that someone was watching him. A few times he thought he saw movement out of the side of his eye but when he looked nothing was there. At the end of the block, Tim came to a large apartment building with tall evergreen bushes along the front and sides of the building. He took a large number of rolled papers from the cart. He held all of the papers under his left arm. In his right hand he had a shillelagh. Tim’s father had brought the shillelagh from Ireland when he immigrated to America. Tim carried the shillelagh in his cart to fend off unfriendly dogs, and just in case, for protection from people. His brothers had told him that all of the paperboys carried a big stick or metal bar on morning paper routes in Uptown.

He went around the side of the building and started down the gangway which was in half light from the rising sun. The man from the corner slipped quietly out of the bushes into the gangway a few feet behind Tim.

“Hey kid! Hold on. I want to talk to you!” The man spoke in a soothing friendly voice.

Tim spun around like a top. He knew immediately that it was the man from the corner. A stream of hot urine ran down his left leg until he regained his control. He dropped the rolled papers from under his left arm, and raised the shillelagh.

“Whoa! Hold on kid. I only want to talk to you. I’m not going to hurt you. There’s no need to hit me.”

“Get away from me mister! Leave me alone. Go away.” Tim said in a halting, uneven voice. His voice was still going through the change from a boy’s voice to a man’s.

The man stayed where he was, but shuffled back and forth like he had done on the corner. Tim noticed that he was much older than he had appeared from a distance. The man leered at him through dark deep-set eyes that had pupils as wide as quarters in watery eye sockets. He was several inches shorter than Tim, who at 6 feet was tall for his age. The man was very thin almost skinny and had a sickly appearance and greasy looking whiskers on his face.

“Kid, I just want to see if we can be friends. See, here’s ten bucks for you,” and the man took a ten dollar bill out of his pocket and held it up for Tim to see.

“I have more money for you at my apartment, just around the block. We can go there and have some fun. I can give you a blow job. You’ll like it. It feels real good. And then you can give me a blow job so I can feel good too.”

Tim knew what a blow job was. The thought of doing this with the disgusting pervert in front of him made him feel sick and angry. He was afraid to turn and run in case the man jumped him from behind. Tears began to well up in his eyes as he realized he needed to drive the pervert away.

He grabbed the shillelagh with both hands and banged hard against the wall of the gangway, yelling in a cracking voice, “Get away from me you pervert. Get away!”

Tim moved toward the pervert with the shillelagh raised. The man leaned back in shocked surprise.

“Don’t hit me kid. I won’t hurt you. I’ll leave you alone,” he hastily spit out, as he turned and stumbled up the gangway stairs.

Tim quickly bent over and put the shillelagh down, and picked up two rolled papers. He hurled the papers at the man, hitting him in the back with one and barely missing him with the other.

He screamed, “Get out of here you pervert. Get away from me.”

Tim picked up his shillelagh and went back out to the paper cart. He looked around to make sure that the man was gone. He wiped the tears that had involuntarily streamed down his cheeks onto his shirt sleeve. Tim stood for a while not sure what to do next. He was shaken but felt a responsibility to finish his route. Slowly and cautiously he went back to delivering papers.

A half hour later after finishing his route Tim was walking his cart in the street on the way back to the paper barn. The red Murphy’s truck turned the next corner and came down the street toward him. Mickey stuck his arm and head out the window as he drove up next to Tim’s cart.

With a broad smile Mickey said, “All done Timmy? Is everything O’K?” He could tell from the pained look on Tim’s face that something was seriously wrong.

Mickey got out of the truck and walked over to Tim. “What’s wrong Timmy? What happened to you?”

Tim began to tell Mickey what had happened. As much as tried not to, he broke down and cried, sobbing with his chest heaving as he told Mickey about the pervert.

Mickey put his arm around his shoulder, and said repeatedly as he listened, “Son-of-a-bitch, Goddam pervert. He’ll pay for this.”

Mickey took Tim’s cart and pushed it into an open parking spot. He told Tim to get in. Mickey called Peter on the truck radio and told him quickly what had happened to Tim. He told Peter to meet him on the street across from Sal’s Restaurant, a hang out in Uptown frequented by perverts, winos and small time criminals.

Mickey parked across the street from Sal’s, a typical Chicago store front restaurant with big plate glass window across the front that made it easy to see the people sitting in the restaurant. Mickey told Tim to look for the pervert. Tim looked around at the people in the restaurant. He froze when he saw the man sitting at the counter. Even though Tim could only see him from the side, he knew that was the man, and he would never forget him.

Mickey asked, “Do you see the son-of-a-bitch?”

Tim nodded. ”He’s the man sitting at the end of the counter reading the Trib.

“Alright,” Mickey said. “Peter should be here in a minute. Just sit back and relax.”

Peter arrived a few minutes later. Mickey told him which person was the pervert. He asked Peter to take Tim home and call the Chicago Police Department precinct commander for Uptown.

“Tell O’Hara that I plan to make a citizen’s arrest of a pervert that has been harassing one of our boys. I’ll bring him into the station after I have first crack at him.”

Tim rode in silence with Peter. He dropped Tim at the corner of Racine and Montrose. He drove away after telling Tim to get some rest and forget about what happened. Tim continued to deliver papers for Murphy’s until he started high school. He didn’t see the pervert again, but he would never forget the man’s dark deep-set eyes leering at him in the half light.