Gumbo and I tossed a Frisbee, waiting for our mamas to call us in for dinner, while Danny, another one of my brothers’ friends, screamed by from one end of the block to the other, passing within a few feet of us on his gigantic chopper . . .
Shy and his cousin Adam stood thigh-deep in Jamaica Bay, grabbing horseshoe crabs by their long tails and throwing them into the boat. Shy tossed them gently; Adam swung them down hard. The moon was round and bright like a police searchlight, which scared Shy, but Adam had explained that horseshoe crabs came up on the shore to spawn during summer full moons, and this was the time to make their score . . .
And in all the feeding of fine foods . . .
The new teacher, Mister Moran, was on an exchange program from New York. Our school was a nickname maelstrom—Ghoul, Moose, Bull, Scab, Pox-face, Arse-brain. He was Moron straight off. He got off easy. You should have seen him . . .
I always told myself that I’d never use anything stronger than pot. I was a middle class kid away from home, NYU, my second year of art school, and hard drugs scared the shit out of me. But pot, I loved it. I smoked in the morning, afternoon and night. I’d go to school stoned, paint stoned, fuck stoned. It was 1970 and I was living on Avenue C. It looked like the set for an end of the world movie: deserted tenements, bums, hustlers, junkies and pushers on every corner . . .
“I wanted him dead because of the foie gras ban. He was the guy who got it banned in Chicago. And he’s my alderman. I’ve lived in Rogers Park my whole life. I’ve seen a lot of asshole politicians come and go, a lot of machine Democrats and Daley patsies, but this guy is the worst . . .”
There was a murdered corpse found across the street from us, on the top floor of the vacant house at the end of the block, across the alley from the KFC. The house is no longer vacant. It has been renovated and new tenants have moved into the apartment where the body was found. There are only a couple of vacant houses left in the row now, and all of the units on our side of the street are full; I see the windows lit up like eyes in the masonry on my way home at night. The neighborhood is changing . . .
Without realizing it, she had bludgeoned him to death with a statue of La Virgen de los Ángeles.
But how had it killed him? It was just a hollow, bronze replica of the black Madonna and child. Was it because it was filled with holy water? Or because she had slammed it like a machete into sugar cane?