Not that there weren’t ample illustrations of that principle at the edge of the daily round of life where bag ladies combed alleys and the homeless, sleeping in junked cars, were found frozen to death in winter. Laid-off workmen became wife beaters in their newfound spare time; welfare mothers in the projects turned tricks to supplement the family budget; and it seemed that almost every day someone lost teeth at one or another of the corner bars.
The shout would go up—“Fight!”—and kids would flock in anticipation, especially if a couple of alkies were whaling at one another, because invariably loose change would fly from their pockets. The scramble for nickels and dimes would spawn secondary fights among us. And if we weren’t quick enough, we’d be scattered by Sharky, a guy who’d lost his legs in Korea, or riding the rails to Alaska, or to sharks off Vera Cruz, depending on which of his stories you wanted to believe. He was a little nuts, and people wondered if he remembered anymore himself where exactly his legs had been misplaced.
Sharky mopped up late at Juanita’s bar, but his main source of income was scavenging. He was also known as Gutterball for the way he’d rumble along alleys and curbs on a homemade contraption like a wide skateboard that he propelled with wooden blocks strapped over gloved hands, turning his hands into hooves. Late on summer nights, you could hear him clopping down the middle of deserted streets like a runaway stallion. Call him Gutterball to his face or get in his way, and he’d threaten to crack your kneecap with one of those wooden hooves.
It wasn’t an idle threat, he’d been in several brawls. They usually started with a question: “What the fuck you looking at, ostrich-ass?”
Anyone with legs was an ostrich to Sharky.
“Huh?” came the usual response.
But Sharky wouldn’t let it go at that. “Admit it, you rude motherfuck, you were staring at my bald spot, weren’t you?”
Sharky did have a bald spot. He’d roll slowly toward the confused ostrich, who’d begin edging backward as Sharky’s pace increased.
“You never seen a bald spot on wheels before? That it? I’m very fucken sensitive about my bald spot. Or is it something else about me that attracted your attention? Like, maybe, that I’m at a convenient height for giving head. You the kind of perv that wants a baldy bean doing wheelies while sucking your dick?”
By now, Sharky had gained momentum and was aimed for a collision if the ostrich didn’t take off running, which he usually did, with Sharky galloping after him, raging, “Run, you perverted, chickenshit biped!”
Sharky obviously enjoyed these confrontations. What nobody suspected was that such spectacles were only a substitute for what he really craved: a parade.
There was no shortage of parades in Little Village. Most ethnic groups had one, and that must have figured in Sharky’s thinking. St. Patrick’s brought out the politicians, and St. Joseph’s was also known locally as St. Polacik Day since people wore red, the background color for the white eagle on the Polish flag. I never understood what was particularly Polish about St. Joseph, but I bought a pair of fluorescent red socks especially for the occasion.
The Mexicans had two big holidays. The first was El Grito, a carnival at the end of summer, when as part of the festivities a wrestling ring was erected in the middle of Nineteenth Street. There’d be pony rides, and Mick and I would try to time it so as to be in the saddle when the El roared overhead because the ponies would rear.
The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, was more solemn. Each December twelfth, no matter the weather, a procession wound through the streets led by a plaster likeness of the Virgin who’d appeared not to the Spanish conquerors but to a poor Indian, Juan Diego. She’d imprinted her mestiza image on his cloak — a miracle still there for all to see at the basilica in Mexico City. She’d told Juan Diego to gather flowers for her in a place where only cactus grew. When he did her bidding, he found a profusion of Castilian roses, and so all through Little Village people carried roses and sang hymns in Spanish to the Virgin whose delicate sandal had crushed the head of Quetzalcoatl, the snake god ravenous for human sacrifice. Even the alderman and precinct captains marched holding roses. And each year there was the fantastic rumor that the great Tito Guizar, the Mexican movie star of Rancho Grande— a singing cowboy like Roy Rogers — would arrive on a palomino to lead the procession through the barrio. His movies played at the Milo theater on Blue Island, where they showed films in Spanish. I’d study the posters I couldn’t read and wonder if his rearing horse was a celebrity in Mexico, the way that Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, was a star in America.
Then, one year, Tito Guízar actually showed. Down Washte-naw, heading for Twenty-second, he came riding right behind the Virgin, not on a palomino but on a prancing white horse whose mane blew in the feathery twirl of the early snowfall. The horse left pats of golden manure steaming in the street, while Tito Guizar, dressed in black leather chaps studded with silver, his guitar strapped across his back like a rifle, waved his sombrero, blessing the shivering crowd that lined the sidewalks to see him.
As the procession approached St. Roman Church, a motorcycle gunned to life, spooking the white horse, and while Tito Guízar whoaed at the reins, a Harley rumbled out of the alley beside the rectory. It was pulling Sharky, who was attached to the rear fender by a clothesline like a coachman commanding the reins of a carriage. The Harley was driven by Cyril Bombrowski, once known as Bombs. He’d been a motorcycle maniac until, doing seventy down an alley, he’d collided with a garbage truck. He had a metal plate in his head and didn’t ride much anymore, as he was prone to seizures since the wipeout. Now people called him Spaz, and when he rode down the street, it was a tradition that whoever saw him first would yell a Paul Revere — like warning: “Spaz Attack!”
No one yelled this time. Behind Spaz and Sharky, a procession of the disabled from the parish emerged from the alley. A couple of World War II vets, mainstays from the bar at the VFW Club, one with a prosthetic hook and the other with no discernible wound other than the alcoholic staggers; and Trib, the blind newspaper vendor; and a guy who delivered pulp circulars, known only as — what else? — the Gimp, pushing his wheelchair for support; and Howdy, who’d been named after Howdy Doody because his palsy caused him to move like a marionette with tangled strings.
It was a parade of at most a dozen, but it seemed larger-enough of a showing so that onlookers could imagine the battalions of wounded soldiers who weren’t there, and the victims of accidents, industrial and otherwise, the survivors of polio and strokes, all the exiles who avoided the streets, who avoided the baptism of being street-named after their afflictions, recluses who kept their suffering behind doors, women like Maria Savoy, who’d been lighting a water heater when it exploded, or Agnes Lutensky, who remained cloistered years after her brother blew off half her face with a shotgun during an argument over a will.
With their canes, crutches, and the wheelchair, it looked more like a pilgrimage to Lourdes than a parade. They’d been assembled by Sharky and now marched, although that’s hardly an accurate word for their gait, beneath the banner of a White Sox pennant clamped in a mop stick that the Gimp had mounted on his beat-up wheelchair. The Gimp never sat in his chair but rather used it like a cart, piling it with bags of deposit bottles and other commodities he collected while delivering the circulars no one read. Today, the chair was empty of junk.