Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [30]
I ask Lyon whether, after twenty-five years of trying cases in which someone has taken the life of another, often in a quite brutal fashion, her work hasn’t tainted her view of humanity. She replies that it hasn’t—that in fact she’d been buoyed by periodic displays of nobility, including the time the mother of a murdered prostitute told Lyon that she didn’t want her daughter’s killer put to death because, she said, “I don’t want to be like him.” Later in our conversation, however, Lyon tells me that if there’s one lesson she’s learned at 26th Street it’s that “the line is thin and anyone can cross it. Anyone. I used to think ‘I’m a nice, loving person. There’s no way I could ever commit a violent act.’ But you do this long enough, you know anyone can kill. Anyone. Under the right circumstances. If you understand that, then maybe you have a little more appreciation for the freedoms you have here. It isn’t someone else’s problem.”
I meekly suggest to her that maybe her perception of the world has changed some—or, at least, that it’s different from those of us who are not at 26th Street on a regular basis. She doesn’t exactly deny it. Instead, she tells me the story of a friend in private practice who once told Lyon that he didn’t feel like “a real lawyer” except when he was at 26th Street. “I know what he meant,” she tells me. “When I walk into that building, I feel like I’m coming home. It’s hard to explain exactly.”
It Takes All Kinds
When I first moved to Chicago in 1983, I rented an apartment in Wicker Park, a neighborhood of modest redbrick apartment buildings and wood-framed family homes, although on Pierce Avenue there’s a row of majestic Victorian houses built at the turn of the century by German merchants, the nouveaux riches of their day who were looking to make a statement that they’d made it. When I arrived, the area was in transition, an amalgam of old Germans and Poles, young Hispanic families, and young white artists. The places to hang out then were the Busy Bee, a Polish coffee shop that served pierogis and potato pancakes, and the basketball courts in the park from which the neighborhood derived its name.
I lived on a street shaped like a boomerang, just across the street from the basketball courts; even on weekday afternoons, I could usually find a game there. I was single then, and lived on the third floor of a three-flat, a narrow redbrick building that was warmed by built-in gas space heaters in the middle of each kitchen. (They’re still common in the city’s older buildings.) The single heater’s pencil-thin flames were hardly enough to warm the four-room apartment, and by early winter a sheet of ice would form on the inside of my windows. It would get so cold come January that I’d move my mattress to the kitchen floor, next to the heater. There were three of us in the building. On the first floor was a guy who ran a bike repair shop out of his apartment, and just downstairs from me were two men in their twenties who spent their days shooting up heroin and their nights looking for ways to finance their habit—which at one point included crawling through the transom above my back door and relieving me of my rather feeble stereo system and record collection.
Soon after I arrived, I learned