The year 1974 began with me watching a Marx Brothers movie on WGN in the partially finished basement of our next-door neighbors, the Birdlemans. Hopped up on Pepsi and cocktail wieners, I relished the late-night affair, despite the basement’s dog hair and exposed, asbestos-wrapped plumbing. Mr. and Mrs. Birdleman were upstairs entertaining friends in the manner still reminiscent of the prior decade—stiff drinks, cigarettes, and Polyester knit dresses. My parents attended the party alongside a number of disparate people, many of whom were associates of Mr. Birdleman, a regional branch manager for AAA, the road and travel outfit. The kids were told to stay downstairs to avoid the shenanigans of conservative forty-somethings guzzling vodka gimlets while debating the growing interest in the Illinois representative, Abner Mikva, winning another term.
Darren Robinson, a friend of ours from school and bantam hockey team, was spending the night at my house before he returned to temporarily stay with his aunt. Jimmy Birdleman, also on the same hockey team, was happy to invite him and me over to their side of the duplex for the New Year’s Eve shenanigans. Darren’s parents had to attend to his grandmother in Kentucky due to a heart issue.
Jimmy and his sister, Karen, put out a pretty good spread. They had a hotdog cart their dad had won in a AAA raffle a couple years earlier, and a side table had all kinds of chips, salty nuts, and cans of soda lined up like ammunition.
Jimmy’s sister had invited a few friends to the basement party. The only other one I knew was Susie Carter, an older girl down the street. She and Karen were both sophomores in high school. Susie had long brown hair and was the object of my pubescent infatuation. Susie wore form-fitting, bell-bottom jeans and T-shirts from concerts of rock bands I knew little about.
One of the few times I had to come upstairs, I waited to use the bathroom next to a man, Harold Schulz, the son of the developer behind a couple of neighborhoods in Evanston. My father had told me that Harold’s father, Otto, had named Martha Lane, a cul de sac at the outer reaches of northwest Evanston, after his wife. My father had pointed him out when we first arrived, but I was told to be respectful, not to bother him about it.
“Why not?” I asked.
“To be honest, I’m not exactly sure that’s him.”
Huddled nearby were two men with their respective tumblers of brown liquid. The first man, wearing a checkered sport coat, glanced at me only briefly, realizing a ten-year old boy posed no threat to his discussion. “Those Northwestern students have the vote now. I think Mikva owes them a lot.”
The other man, stout with a mustache, nodded his head in requisite approval. “God knows those poor kids deserve something better than Nixon.”
Checkered sport coat cocked his head. “Yeah, maybe.”
Darren appeared from the basement, tip-toeing on the carpet as though a sleeping dragon were in his path.
“Mikva has stones, I gotta say.” Checkered sport coat rattled the cubes in his glass. “He shows up to help the Stevenson campaign in ‘48 at a Chicago office. Some committee guy asks him who sent him. Abner says ‘Nobody sent me.’ And the committee guy says, ‘We don’t want nobody that nobody sent.’ Try following that.” They both laughed, one with a mid-range rattle of tobacco use.
While Mr. Schulz—or his doppelganger—took an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom, I leaned my head into the living room. I could see my parents talking with the other guests, separate but somehow connected. My father, a philosophy professor at Northwestern, was sitting on the couch talking with a zaftig woman in a dark print dress and complementing blue eye shadow. She covetously held a cigarette over a glass ashtray resting on an end table. My mother, happy to push the buttons of any anti-Mikva voter, was standing by a large painting of a Roman city in ruin, laughing with a couple about ten years her senior if their thinning hair were any indication.
My father had been known to move out of our house to a nearby men’s residence in South Evanston. I had grown accustomed to my parents’ unusual arrangement. When home, he expressed his sadness toward most things indirectly. He would read the afternoon Chicago Daily News or stare out the living room window to the street, giving me a taciturn smile only to return to his gaze. Often, upon returning from work, he would cozy up on the couch to nap, keeping his Valium habit a secret from me and my sister. He would have a cocktail around dinner time presumably to give the illusion that his altered state was due to alcohol. He may have been more interested in convincing himself than the rest of us.
We all had to watch him “step out” from time to time. His inability to tell my mother what he was feeling wore her down, making her equally sad, but, because she was not actually depressed in any clinical sense, her feelings would shift to frustration and anger. Perhaps in a response to my father’s emotional disconnection and lack of engagement, my mother threw herself into civic activities. She had gone to the ’68 convention and asked my sister to go along. Being only eight at the time, she understandably declined. My father’s absence changed my house. We had all kinds of guests passing through for one event or another, sometimes spending the night. My mom said Jerry Rubin hung out one night. I don’t really remember what he looked like, but there was this crazy guy who sat on our coffee table and broke it. During father’s hiatus, my mom would enjoy sit-com TV with me and laugh through my impersonations of voices I heard on my father’s old Ernie Kovacs and Spike Jones records.
As I waited for the bathroom, I felt like I was intruding on my parents, like some private barrier was about to be broken, destroying the necessary secrecy of adult affairs. The occasional whiff of Brut and menthol cigarettes mixed with the odor of a full work week were invisible guardians to the forbidden land of the living room. I understood those ethereal boundaries quite well. Holding together a family is built on linchpins of vapor, a delicate alchemy of trust and measured suspicion.
Knowing the second-floor toilet was completely off limits, Darren and I stood there eagerly waiting to do our business and return to the basement.
“You boys having fun downstairs?” Checkered sport coat asked.
“Yessir,” Darren said.
“This must be fun for you, right?”
“It is,” I said.
“No, sorry, I meant your friend. Being at a party like this.”
“Sir?” Darren stuck his thumbs inside his front belt loops.
“A whole different world over here, huh.” His smile turned crooked.
“He’s been here before,” I said. “We go to school together.”
“I’m sure you do.” Checkered coat turned back toward the other man.
Around 11:45pm, Jimmy returned from upstairs. He pulled a bottle of champagne from under his sweatshirt, hiding it from his sister, and made a beeline toward the other end of the basement. Darren and I followed, curious more than tempted.
By midnight, having missed much of Rufus T. Firefly in “Duck Soup,” the three of us were already ahead of the celebration. The record player was the grid iron of a constant battle between Quadrophenia and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. At times a K-Tel record would surface, jarring the room with The Morning After by mistake. We all laughed at the song, mocking its hangover implications, having little understanding of the difficulties of relationship.
By one in the morning, my mom popped her head downstairs to officially put an end to our party, at least our participation in it. Jimmy waved goodbye as he took another swig of his special ginger ale.
The next morning, I was awakened by Darren poking my shoulder mumbling something about pancakes and bacon. I could smell it too. Clearly my mom had something special waiting for us downstairs for breakfast. We snickered at our alcohol deceit from the night before.
People looked at Darren differently than me when we were goofing off on Central Street, a couple blocks from my house, like at Herdrick’s dime store to buy Wacky Packs trading cards or work our jaws on Everlasting Gobstoppers. One time my mom got a phone call from someone on our block, saying that some kid was stealing one of our bikes. It was just Darren leaving our side yard on his orange Ross Apollo. I laughed at the time, thinking how I wouldn’t be caught dead on an orange three-speed.
We made the extra trek to Ackerman Park after breakfast because we liked skating around the trees that stuck up through the ice and playing hockey with kids who weren’t from our neighborhood.
After a sloppy game with four older boys who attended Haven Middle School, Darren and I hit the warming house. I thought it was a good idea to see if Darren liked this girl I had a crush on. A delicate maneuver.
“Why did you push Priscilla into the snow?” I asked, pulling my gloves tighter with my teeth.
Darren smirked while looking down at his skates. “I don’t know.”
“I thought you liked her,” I said.
“Man, she just thinks she’s so great. Told me I lived in the scary Evanston.”
I chopped the end of my skate blade into the ice. “She’s pretty though.”
“That Susie girl last night was somethin’.”
“She’s already got some boyfriend,” I said rolling my eyes.
“Yeah, you.”
“Man, shut up.”
As we were leaving the warming house to hit the ice once again, I caught a glimpse of the attendant on duty. He sat on a folding chair with his arms crossed. But he kept staring at Darren. His eyes followed him all the way out the door.
Stepping back onto the ice, I said, “What’s his problem?”
“Who?” Darren asked.
“That guy in charge in there. He kept looking at you.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I know.” We skated over to one of the big elm trees sticking out of the rink. “That’s nothing. Last summer Ty and me are coming home,” he continued, poking his fingers on the bark of the tree as if it were a map. “We’re at the corner right here at McDaniel and Golf, just that little bit from McCormick.”
“We’re waiting for the light to change. I’m like leaning down to tie my shoe, and some white guy driving a station wagon yells out the window, ‘You boys are on the wrong side of the canal. This isn’t your neighborhood. You boys get back on over. Go on! Before it gets too dark’.” He wedged the top of the hockey stick under his chin. “That’s messed up.”
“How’s he know where you live?” I shook my head.
“Yeah, but, here’s the thing…There were two white boys in the back seat laughing their asses off at what he said.”
I felt uncomfortable in that moment, inadequate, exposed as complicit in something Darren was keeping from me. “That sucks,” I said.
“The kids sunk down in their seats, but I saw ‘em.”
In need of a good thaw, we returned to my house for lunch. My mom had made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, and we ate on the floor while watching Hollywood Squares.
“My mom says this is dirty,” Darren said.
“Probably. I mean, sometimes it’s funny.
After lunch, my mom drove us to the apartment of Darren’s aunt. She lived a couple blocks from his actual house. I got to spend the rest of the afternoon with Darren. Mom had pretty much stopped being my chauffeur, but it was January in Evanston and bitingly cold. We drove down McCormick and turned east on Dempster in our Buick Electra.
In the summer, when I would ride my bike to Darren’s, we would meet up at an area called the “Woods,” a semi-industrial patch of town with trees and bushes flanking the north branch of the Chicago canal. Darren’s family had moved to this part of town, the 2nd Ward, a couple of years earlier. His aunts and uncles lived in another part of Evanston. Darren told me once his mom said they were “trailblazers.” That sounded cool. Having much of the Woods to himself, Darren would say it felt like he was in Africa. He could see elephants. I knew he was pulling my leg, although I envisioned a host of animals. My mind would play tricks on me and swear I saw baboons jumping through the trees instead of midwestern squirrels. From time to time, when actual deer leapt out of the blinds, it scared me half to death. I felt miles away from my neighborhood.
When Darren’s family moved to the 2nd Ward, his mother had befriended Sheryl Salnick, a Jewish lady who lived on their block. Mrs. Salnick’s oldest son collected comic books. That afternoon, after running the neighborhood, Darren and I jumped a fence to the back of the Salnick’s house, knocked on the basement door, and Michael Salnick pushed it open from below. Regardless of the weather, he wore Bermuda shorts and worn slippers. Slightly nervous, I walked down into the basement behind Darren to finger through a sea of boxes filled with comics in plastic sleeves. The smell of mildew and cardboard was robust, almost distracting me from my constant fear of being trapped in a basement with a guy of indeterminate age smoking in the corner.
I whispered in Darren’s ear. “Creepy dude.”
“Don’t worry. He’s seen my mom angry.”
“So what are you boys looking for?” Michael asked.
“I don’t know,” Darren said with his head down, flipping through the comics. “Something I like.”
Michael took a big pull from his cigarette. “How ‘bout Luke Cage. He’s a badass.”
Darren made a sound in his throat. “Maybe. Got any Captain Americas?”
“Third box over there,” Michael said. He turned back to a magazine he was reading.
We each bought a couple of comics. I had a pretty good Spider-man and an old Mad Magazine from 1970 called “Sleazy Riders.” Sounded dirty, so I bought it.
It was already dark by 4:30pm. Darren and I stood in front of his aunt’s place. My mother, right on time, pulled up in our Buick. My hands were numb by this point, balled up inside the rigid glove, the tips frozen with spit and snow.
“That’s me,” I said.
Darren kept his hands in his coat pockets. “Cool.”
“Talk to you later.” I hopped down the sidewalk stomping my boots to fight the cold.
“Hey, John,” Darren called out. “I didn’t tell you the whole thing.”
“About what?”
“Those boys in that car.” Darren sniffed and wiped his nose from the cold. “I think one of ‘em was Jimmy.”
“Birdleman?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you do something last night?” I asked.
“Nah. The party was cool. Maybe he’s just pissed I’m skating the first line and he’s not.”
“You sure he even saw it was you?”
“All I know is that man didn’t want me there, and they thought it was funny.” We were quiet, other than the crinkle of our gloves and that odd sound that comes with bitter, winter air. Darren said, “I feel weird riding my bike to your house now.”
“Don’t worry about it. I can come here.”
Darren nodded. He turned and walked inside.
I got in the beast of the car. I felt unusually small. My mom pulled away from the curb and turned off the radio after a couple of blocks.
“Your dad’s taking a break,” she said. “He’ll be gone for a little while.”
“How long this time?” I turned the radio back on.
“Not sure.” She smiled at me, then continued to look forward at the road.
*****
Scott Markwell is a lecturer of rhetoric at DePaul University and has taught English literature for other Chicago institutions. After a couple decades as a commercial actor, he has returned to writing. He lives outside of Chicago with his wife and two children.
