That’s me talking to the photographer, Steven Gross, over one of the many breakfasts we shared at Chin’s Diner, at Canal and 18^th Street, on the south side of Chicago  

© 1982 Steven E. Gross   Chicago

 I had finally found a suitable studio and hauled my things all the way from south-central Kansas. The move into the charming old creamery in South Chicago would be more difficult than I had imagined. I was wary of everyone around me after much of my car’s contents had been stolen several weeks before, when I had made my first visit, scouting parts of the city for a rental I could afford. The area of the theft was the Gold Coast, a fancy Chicago neighborhood in the North Loop area of downtown where I had found a nominally priced hotel room and truck storage for two nights prior to the thorny part of the move.

I was finally settled in the new studio after two more days of watching the neighborhood kids eye my stuff. I realized I was in the roughest neighborhood I had ever seen. The studio was eighteen blocks south of the Loop. The surrounding houses were small, worn down, and a major highway overpass divided the entire area. There was a continual rumble in sound and vibration from the busy elevated highway. Exhaust and mixtures of soot and tire rubber seemed to hang in the air, leaving a flocking on the surrounding surfaces, both indoors and out.

Rats were brazenly scurrying around the heaps of trash that piled against the various abandoned building fronts, and on the barren lots. Groups of rowdy boys would launch eggs, bottles and other projectiles at passing cars, then disappear between the buildings and among the wrecked cars as the driver-victims screeched to a halt. Commuter retribution was never successful, with no help from the authorities, or residents.

I saw several incidents, and the fear of reprisals was so great that I never came forward. In my mind, I was the worst sort of coward, paralyzed by a fear I had never experienced. The toughest of the kids gave me hate-stares and yelled threats, but never approached me when I froze on the sidewalks, then a kid from the neighborhood poked his head into my studio one day, and I found I was being noticed in a different way.

Julio was thirteen years old, but the marks of his jagged life were immediately apparent in the way he spoke. His parents were Puerto Rican, but he had been born in Chicago.

“My cousin Beto said to stay away from that ‘white guy’…hey I’m as white as you man!”

He handed me half of an ear of roasted corn. “Eat man!...eees good haint it?”

It smelled really good. I remembered talking to the Mexican street corn vender a day before, watching the kids gather around him. I took the corn from Julio.

“That’s good…man! Really good…thank you.”

“Heh! White guys eat maize just like us!...Oh!, oh!…what time is it?”

“It’s 2:30.”

“Gotta go man! My ass is grass man!” He walked towards the door.

I laughed. “You know, gringos say that. ‘My ass is grass.’”

Julio stopped. He turned and gave me a strange, ironic smile.

“You white dudes don’t have asses!”

This kid held the extraordinary quality that all the neighborhood kids shared. It was the gift of curiosity as a prequel to the inevitable jading after passing their eighteenth birthdays. I wanted to rescue Julio, but in whatever humanitarian design my immature mind could invent, I would always be reminded there were thousands of others.

I found out later the local priest was having conversations with various parents in the neighborhood, persuading them to rein in their kids and stop the car assaults. In this neighborhood, when the church did any outreach, the parents listened, and for some reason, the kids thought I had something to do with the priest’s efforts. I wasn’t Catholic, but just like the priest, I was a “white guy.”

In my imagination, I pictured strife and familial cruelty against the aspirations of countless kids stifled by the curse of poverty. The streets were grey, except for the occasional accidental hues and textures of discarded products, cigarette butts, and broken glass. There were stray dogs, scraggly and frightened, urinating on the corners of buildings as residents threw rocks to chase the furry vagrants into the next block. Despite the Church’s good intentions, how could a kid crawl out of this hollow pit of hopelessness?

I felt as if Chicago was stealing the bulk of what was left of my confidence; the city had dumped the remainder into the streets and gutters around my dwelling in this old neighborhood. I was nearly paralyzed with a strange foreboding. Homesickness was cutting a hollow place in my gut. I woke up with it every morning, and over my tea, I fantasized on the ordeal of my parents receiving my lifeless body back in Kansas…an unsuspecting victim of my over-active imagination about Southside Chicago Gangsters.

On the fifth morning, after showering and a meager breakfast, I made my way over to the bus stop, eyeing the groups of men who gathered outside my studio. They were darker than me, speaking and yelling in Spanish. To my naïve mind, there wasn’t any doubt they had malevolent designs and thought only about battering me into some unrecognizable mass.

In the center of this group, Julio stood speaking loudly in Spanish and gesturing in my direction.

“Strange” I thought.

I tried not to catch anyone’s gaze, but in an instance, one of the heavily tattooed guys caught my eye…

He leaned his head slightly and his face opened into a broad smile. He nodded, and spoke a short salutation in Spanish. The other men turned their gaze towards me, and all smiled, nodding…a few of them waved. Julio looked at me, grinned, and gave me a winking nod.

I took a long breath…

Little things can melt fear. The simple, collective “hello” was like a current from a warm ocean, enveloping me wholly, allowing a return to normal breathing. The very texture of the grey streets seemed to soften, with nary a truck’s rumble, nor noxious belches of fouled air. The sky was ever blue…so incredibly blue.

As I looked skyward, tracing the course of a strange, low cloud, Julio and the other men followed my gaze. Some of them chuckled, pointing up, and others looked in my direction, nodding and grinning. The cloud became an oval, and then smoothly formed a gigantic ring that seemed to encircle the grey morning moon for an exquisite chance moment of visual perfection. I could hear several men gasp at the amazing vision.

We all stood mesmerized for a long moment, and then saying nothing, I waved as I passed on. The man closest to me grabbed my hand and shook it. His dark eyes were of polished opal, and I could see them well up, banishing the last remnants of my fear. I marveled at the miracle of the morning sky. Things were really okay…

 My unease was gone. I smiled back at them, turned again to the dirty sidewalk, and a small hope took hold of me in the brilliant morning light.