I want to say the day of the fire I started at Bernie’s Grocery was the hottest day of the year, but it might not have been; it was always hot back then, and all I did in that heat was wait for someone to come out and join me on the corner. I sat out there and wondered why God had wasted the only swimming pool in Bridgeport on Billy Coz, who never wanted to swim in it. It wasn’t until high school that I finally jumped his fence and went skinny-dipping one night. After busing tables at Connie’s Pizza and smoking a joint with the waitresses and going out to Chinatown, I finally jumped his fence and went swimming. After that I went in his pool a few more times. Always at 3 AM. Quiet as a thief in the movies.
I saw the fire engines the moment I stepped out of the Chicago Today office. I debated going home down 31st Street, but I walked toward the fire instead. I tried the trick of breathing in deep and letting it out slow to keep my heart from thumping out of my skin, but it didn’t work.
I wasn’t punished enough.
It was dark in the hallway. It smelled like a building no one cared about. Or where no women lived. And this next part is not only in the now of that night—which is to say, in my memory of it—but it was there in the then of it too. Every step I took, a part of me was thinking, Why am I doing this? This doesn’t seem right. I keep wanting to blame someone else for that day, but there is no one else to blame. My father was gone by then, and my mother was still in her 30s. She was still pretty too. And she was alive. She’s alive now, too, but not like then.
At some point—maybe it was after—I thought about my guys from the old neighborhood. Bridgeport, I mean. Any one of them might have come this far. None of them would have said no to smoking a joint and drinking Special Export beer in a stranger’s apartment. But the camera was different. Probably if they were all there at once—even just two of them—they would have beat the shit out of Al, and probably Rick too. There would have been blood. But if they were only there one at a time—I don’t know.
Rick didn’t get on the bus with me that night. I closed the door behind me, and Rick was still on the other side.
“Gun Control” by Laura Adamczyk
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