Alley Rats

It’s hard to look into your own mind when you’re searching for answers to your life. That was why I was here, sitting on this plush couch. To find the answers that had long since avoided me for half of my life.1

I arrived at this place from a long time of wandering. A vagrant to the core, I was raised by the streets where my only friends were back alley rats of the four legs and of the two.2

I had been abandoned at birth by my mother and left on the chapel steps of St. Joseph’s; a tall, beanstalk of a building set in the center of the burgeoning Chicago city. At that time it had been the center. When I grew older, and the nuns were tired of my languishing, they would threaten to cast me out of the cold, stone monument of Christ and into the dreaded streets of Chicago. It was 1963; I was six years old. 3

I was there in ’66 for the Division St. riots, although at the time I knew them in perspective as the divided road riots. I remember standing way off to the back under a crumbling, burnt building that legend had told it had never been repaired after the great fire. My little ‘Rican friend Ruben was there with me. Ruben, at fourteen, was shorter than I was when his hair was wet, but when it was dry, his black hair stood up at least another foot. His clothes were warmer too, with no holes to catch the Chicago breeze. Mine happened to be at least two sizes too small, snatched from a line of wire that had dangled across an alleyway. I had been wearing them for months. He’d been living on the streets since he was four with his big brother. His brother was gone by the time we met. Taken by the streets Ruben said, “she just opened her big black mouth and took him in, I guess he didn’t run fast enough”. I never knew what he meant, I knew streets couldn’t swallow a person, but just the way he said it kind of made me wonder. I was alone and he knew how to get around. We were a perfect pair.4

We spent most of the summer surviving on scraps we could find or wrestle away from smaller guys. We stayed away from the working ladies on Hudson, so as not to get killed by their pimps. Generally, we ran the back alleys and ran off anyone unlucky enough to stumble into them. We were alley rats and proud of it. 5

We were fast learners and even faster with our fingers. We got caught at least once at everything we tried, but never twice and one of the other would always come to the rescue. Ruben got his hand caught in a black man’s purple velvet suit, when he tried to lift some cash. That man spun around so fast, his hand snaked out and grabbed Ruben by the collar, shaking him loose and throwing him to the side. Ruben scrambled his legs under him, and half scooted, half crawled away from him as the men gave chase. It took him 2 blocks to lose him and four more before he would stop running. I finally caught up with him about two blocks from our alley. He was fast for a short little guy. I remember his incredulous look and our spontaneous laughter as he held out his fist and turned it palm face up, showing a wad of dough. Even when that guy caught him and shook him loose he’d still managed to hold on to his prize.6

Ruben and I had stayed friends for what seemed forever, until forever ended. In retrospect it couldn’t have been a full year that we had known each other. I would tell anyone who asked that Ruben himself had been swallowed by the streets, just like his brother. A hand couldn’t always be faster than the trap.7

I still remember the smell: grime tinged, musty and solely from the streets. I’d stayed out there for years before I was picked up for vagrancy by a foot patrol. I was still underage and thought they’d put me in an orphan home, but by then almost all of the orphanages had been forced to close. I remember half hoping that I could be sent back to St. Joseph’s, and knew more likely that I would be sent to a detention hall. It was a brief stay before I was sent out to the Almshouse. It was there that I met Ishmael Price, a young musician of standards; at least that’s how he said it.8

He told me tales of nights sat upon an over turned barrel, listening in the street through a window of an abandoned building that had been set up as a jazz club. He told me of the most free moving, rhythm inspired sound that followed no written track, no rules, just the fusion of creativity. It was a club exclusive to blacks and like most things black, ignored by the whites. It was solely ours. He would knock around the room, jumping and swinging to a tune only he could hear. He used to hold his hand cupped to his ear against the only window in the room and ask me if I heard it too. ‘What?’ I’d asked. 9

“The music, Andy, you’ve got to hear the music!” I thought he was part crazy but part of me wanted to believe that there was something out there that could make a person so happy. I wanted to be that way too. It was luck that had Ishmael and me running across the torn down streets of Chicago to the outer rim of the city, a place I had once called home. Pure luck that had us running into Roscoe Wilkes, the man who put a heart into my soul. 10

I promised Josephine that I would meet with her doctor friend. It seemed like the only thing to do that would assure her that I’m doing all right since her mother passed. Sitting here, I can’t think of anything that would help me more than to take a walk back in Ros Wilkes’ shoes. It had to be time to get out of here; there was no sense in delving into a past that couldn’t be changed and a future that wouldn’t be here without that past. 11

It’s much easier to just stop asking why, and to stop wondering how things got to be the way they are. Jo hates when I tell her that. She seems to understand me least of all or she would have known this was one institution I had never been in and one I would like to die without seeing. 12

My trumpet case lay beside me, scratched and dented. It had seen years of action and occasionally some abuse. The only therapy I need was to play my music and there was a reunion down at Mandel Hall. I could feel the itch to get there starting to rise as I too rose to my feet. Gingerly snatching my case, I walked on that polished marbled floor towards the double store front doors and made my way onto the bright, busy, sun filled streets of Chicago. 13