Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [13]
Unexpectedly moved, I asked Sadlowski whether this rock garden was intended as a monument to what used to be. Sadlowski scowled.
“This isn’t a monument to the fuckin’ steel mills,” he snapped. He placed a conciliatory hand on my shoulder and explained. “It’s a way to enhance my memories of the guys who worked there—the comradeship, the decency, the knowledge I got from them. I owe everything I have to those people. Without them and without Marlene I’d be physically dead. I truly feel that way.”
Millie and Brenda
I’m having lunch at Manny’s, an old-style Jewish delicatessen just south of the Loop, with two longtime friends, Mildred Wortham and Brenda Stephenson. Millie is impulsive and vocal, Brenda more cautious and even-tempered. They’re always in full bloom, bedecked in colorful hip-hugging dresses in the summer, floppy hats and dazzling pantsuits in the winter.
Both of them grew up in Rockwell Gardens, a West Side public housing complex that in the 1980s had the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of murders, rapes, and assaults of any neighborhood in the city. They have since moved, though they still live on the West Side. For seventeen years, they have worked for a small organization, West Side Future, which assists young mothers in their early years of parenting. Brenda and Millie hand out diapers and toothbrushes (when I became a father, they loaded me down with gear as well), and pass along their wisdom. In a sense, they’re professional busybodies. Once, I tagged along with Brenda as she was doing home visits; just as we were leaving the apartment of a nineteen-year-old mother, Brenda whipped around and demanded, “Are you pregnant?” “No way,” the young woman replied. “Just thought I’d ask when your guard was down,” laughed Brenda, who then kissed the teenager’s son before skipping out the door.
On this particular day, as we’re finishing our meal at Manny’s, the two start giggling like little girls. Millie asks the question. Well, it’s really more like a statement.
“So, Alex, I hear you got a little boy on the West Side.”
I’m befuddled, not sure what or whom she’s referring to.
Brenda says, “People say he looks just like you. Real soft-skinned. Curly hair.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask. I laugh, nervously, which is probably not the best thing to do in the face of such a live rumor.
“C’mon, Alex,” Millie says, putting her arm around my shoulder. “You can tell us. People say you got a boy by a girl you know’d on the West Side.”
“You got to be kidding,” I say.
“Yeah, and people say you don’t go see him, or nothing.”
I tell them that’s simply not true—not that I don’t see my son on the West Side, but that any such son exists.
“You can tell us,” Brenda says.
“There’s nothing to tell.” My voice starts to rise. I know I’m sounding a tad defensive. And though by the time we leave Manny’s they tell me that they believe me, I’m not convinced they do. The next time we get together, Brenda pokes me in the ribs, winks, and asks how my boy is.
For fifteen years, Brenda, Millie, and I have been having lunch every couple of months—to gossip, to commiserate, to share stories, to catch up. Once, in the middle of lunch at Edna’s, a soul food restaurant on the West Side, two beefy men sat down at the booth adjacent to ours. They interrupted our conversation and started flirting with Brenda and Millie. “Hey, babe, where you live?” one asked. “What you up to later?” The other man, who I later learned was a local minister, squeezed into the booth next to me, leaned over the table, and in a deep baritone voice complimented Brenda and Millie on their outfits. It was as if I wasn’t there. I figured Brenda and Millie were enjoying it, but in fact they were