Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [14]
Brenda and Millie grew up in the same high-rise, just floors apart. When they were in their twenties, single and swinging, they’d each use the other’s apartment as a place to take their dates. That way, they told me, men wouldn’t know where they lived. The two are inseparable. They’re good at sniffing out parties thrown by politicians, and on occasion they have dragged me along for the free food, and often good music and dancing. People often confuse them. “I’m called Millie all the time,” Brenda says. Because Brenda is more reserved, Millie will often negotiate with men who want to ask her for a date. The two used to breakfast at Moon’s, a working person’s diner up the street from Rockwell Gardens, next to a post office. “We’d be sitting there and guys would come in, and they’d say to Millie, ‘Who’s your friend?’ ” Brenda recalls.
Millie laughs. “So I tell ’em, ‘C’mon, let’s get some coffee and breakfast, and I’ll tell you about her.’ ”
“I wouldn’t know a thing,” says Brenda.
“And I’m telling her, ‘Girl, order your breakfast, ’cause I know it’s taken care of.’ ”
They can get a free ride anywhere in the city. Livery drivers will drop what they’re doing to tote them from one place to another. Once, they got a lift home from a tavern in an ambulance, with sirens screaming; another time they hitched a ride in a hearse.
My friendship with Millie and Brenda revolves around food. It’s what we do when we get together: eat. Millie’s anxious because her son is on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East, so she calls, and we make lunch plans. Or I’m trying to get help for a young man I’ve known for years who I suspect is doing heroin, and so I call them. We make lunch plans.
Chicago is a mecca for some of the nation’s finest chefs, but you’ll learn more about the city itself from its neighborhood restaurants—those establishments where the food is served in heaps rather than manicured slivers, where, if you eavesdrop wisely or linger long enough, you can hear the stories of the neighborhood, of its people, of its legends and of its stresses and strains.
One day, over lunch at Manny’s, Millie tells me of their encounter with a well-known pimp on the West Side named, uninventively, Don Juan. He wore emerald green suits and strutted around the neighborhood as if he owned all the women there. He once boasted to a local reporter that “in fifteen years only one of my girls ever got frost-bitten.” He took a liking to Brenda, and one afternoon the two friends were traveling on the Madison Street bus, when Don Juan pulled up alongside in his emerald green Cadillac, first honking his horn, then pulling in front of the bus. Don Juan sent his driver on board; the man walked up to Brenda and said, “You ain’t got to ride no bus, baby.”
“I ain’t going anywhere,” Brenda told him. “I’m fine.”
“C’mon, baby, your friend can come, too,” he said, pointing to Millie.
Brenda turned her back on him.
Millie’s telling me the story, laughing and shaking her head, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch an older gentleman at the next table clearly enjoying the yarn. He hurriedly buries his head in his newspaper.
Manny’s seems to invite eavesdropping, in large part because of the medley of people it attracts. One weekday morning, I’m there for breakfast, and at one of the nearby Formica tables, four regulars—all elderly men—start passing around something I can’t quite make out. One of them, a retired deputy police superintendent, is smoking a cigar. Another, who used to run a plumbing supply business, is doing all the talking. He’s a short man with a big mouth. He appears to be showing his friends some trinkets he’s hawking. He holds up a pacifier. When he shakes it, it lights up.
“Kids love