The Old Neighborhood Read Free Page A

the baddest kid on the block. At least that’s what I thought I longed for; deep down, all I wanted was for my family to stay together, but I didn’t find that out ’til later.
    My Ma got pregnant with Lil Pat when she was thirteen and the old man was fourteen, and they had to go down to Tennessee to get married ’cause at their age it was illegal in the State of Illinois.
    The far North Side was a strange place back then. Uptown and Edgewater were full of hillbillies from West Virginia who came looking for work, found it, and stayed. Their hillbilly family vendettas came with them. Rifle volleys resounded over Sheridan Ave. from one low-rent high-rise to the next. Folk music flourished. John Prine, Steve Goodman, Fred Holstein—all of them spewed out of the North Side of Chicago.
    At first, my family lived on the second floor of my grandmother’s two-flat. It was right there on Olive Ave. in-between Ashland and Hermitage Ave. in the St. Greg’s Parish. The old man had evolved from street thug, to car thief, to cat burglar, to repo man. In other words, he’d gone pro. And Ma was babysitting. They had three raccoons and a fox as pets. Then, they had Blake. He was a sick baby—had a heart defect—but don’t worry, he grew up to be probably the biggest and strongest of the brothers. Richard was born a couple years later, and everybody said, “Look at the size of the feet on that kid! He’s gonna be a giant!” but he never broke six feet.
    Ma started to worry that my Dad was only gonna give her boys, and she really wanted a little girl. So she thought of adoption, but DCFS was already breathing down her neck because she was running an illegal babysitting outfit out of the apartment, though the only thing illegal was that she had too many kids. What DCFS didn’t understand was that Ma was really good at taking care of ten to twelve kids at a time, in addition to her own.
    She’d read an article in the Trib about adoption and found out that you could adopt kids from third world countries really easy. She and my old man looked into it and started saving. Next thing you know, they’re on a flight to Puerto Rico to change planes and head to the Dominican Republic to adopt a little girl.
    My Dad had earned himself quite a reputation as a tough guy in quite a tough neighborhood at quite a tough time in Chicago. Well, he ends up in the pisser at the airport in Puerto Rico, and he says when he walked in there was a uniformed cop standing at the door. So there he is pissing at a urinal when three “Spanish guys” (they weren’t from Spain, though) walk in and step up behind him in this empty bathroom. Pin-prickles dance up his back and neck. The three of them stood in complete silence behind him, though all the other urinals were open. Dad figured they weren’t gonna wait for him to finish, so he didn’t wait either. With his thang hanging out in mid-stream, he spun around on them. He said he’d never kicked anyone in the face harder in his whole life, which means something because he had a long, storied history of kicking people very hard in the face. At the end, he grabbed the last of them by the head and broke the porcelain urinal with the guy’s cheekbone. When Dad walked out, the cop at the door had evaporated. Interpol grabbed him, and my Ma didn’t know where the hell he was ’cause he didn’t inform her that he was going to the john.
    Anyway, somehow they made it to the Dominican Republic. An adoption agent took them miles inland along winding dirt roads to a tiny village full of huts. They literally lived in a shack made of scrap metal and salvaged wood with chickens and lizards running around on the dirt floor. The girl’s family was comprised of thirteen children from two fathers—the first had passed. My parents went for the infant, but the birth mother urged them to also take the second-youngest in the belief that