Luciano Guerriero - Chicago Noir

While I was working as a reporter in Chicago, from 1993 to 2000, the city changed. Very profound, you say. Of course the city changed in seven years; that’s what cities do. True enough, but cities change during certain periods more than others. In the ‘90s, Chicago changed a lot, and it’s changed even more, and more quickly, in the years since I’ve left.

It’s very possible to visit Chicago these days and see no more grit than you would in, say, Indianapolis. During his nearly twenty-year reign over the city, Richard M. Daley has overseen a studied program of urban renewal, civic booster-ism, and tourist pleasing. His Chicago shines with a well-buffed gloss. One by one, the weird old bars and restaurants, the bizarre little museums, the hardware stores that never had any customers disappeared, some in blatant land-grabs, others subtly, almost imperceptibly, like construction dust blown out to the lake. In their place stand condos and fresh-brick branch libraries, a Frank Gehry bandshell, and a spaceship in the middle of Soldier Field. In many ways, it’s a better city than the one Mayor Daley inherited, but it’s a far less interesting one, and it certainly makes for less interesting stories.

Chicago’s literature, with a brief detour into the world of Saul Bellow and occasional forays by Theodore Dreiser, has rarely concerned itself with the vagaries of the upper and upper-middle classes. The city’s best writers — Nelson Algren, James Farrell, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, and so on — have traditionally used working people as their palette. They accurately captured the rough streets and random cruelty of urban life, but for people living in Chicago, their stories meant something more. They shaped the way Chicagoans think about themselves, and about Chicago.

The excellent new stories I’ve collected in this volume try to fill the gap between how the world sees Chicago and how Chicago sees itself. Many of the stories take nostalgia as a theme. Some have a yellowing snapshot feel, as though they’re trying to archive a city that’s just about gone. Adam Langer looks wistfully back at neighborhood life in the 1970s. C.J. Sullivan’s protagonist, long past whatever sad prime he once had, also remembers the ‘70s as a golden age. Peter Orner drifts even further back, to the 1950s, while inhabiting the mind of one of Chicago’s most sinister criminals, and Claire Zulkey visits the city 100 years ago, when people were strange and their crimes even stranger. Now that was a city worth writing about.

This is a noir book, so it features a little police procedural and lots of gory violence. It contains the full range of urban types, from jazzmen to slam poets, cab drivers to shop-owners, barflies, waitresses, petty thieves, lovelorn husbands, and sexual predators both gay and straight. But Chicago noir, to me, has a special quality of nostalgia, an extra dimension that makes nearly every story seem like an epitaph for a city now gone.

A classic Chicago joke goes, “ What are the three Chicago streets that rhyme with vagina? ” The answer, “ Malvina, Paulina, and Lunt .”

For those of you who haven’t now slammed the book down in disgust, I’m using that joke to illustrate something. Chicago’s neighborhoods have totemic value to those who treasure them, but even more important are its street names. Every intersection runs thick with meaning, and every one has its own personality. So I’ve organized the book by intersection, moving from the Southeast Side, with its view of the smokestacks of Gary, Indiana, to the verdant Wisconsin border in the north. Along the way, many faces of Chicago appear, and the truth of the city’s segregation reveals itself. The first part of the book, the South Side part, is mostly black, with occasional glimpses of the Jews who used to rule that part of town. Then, as we move to mid-South, the book takes on a distinctly Hispanic impression: Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican concerns rule the day, with a paprika sprinkle of Eastern Europe. Once you hit downtown, things turn Anglo pretty fast, with plenty of down-and-out types, but very little variation in skin tone. There’s a brief detour into the melting-pot diversity of the far North Side, and we end up in the northern suburbs, the domain of the WASP ruling class. It’s a journey as old as the city itself, though none of the stories take place on Malvina, Paulina, or Lunt.

Now, with your permission, I’d like to dedicate this book to some of the places I knew in a Chicago that no longer exist. Don’s Coffee Club, Weeds, Rest-n-Pieces, Bucket O’ Suds, Ronny’s Steak Palace, Sharon’s Hillbilly Heaven. The names alone invoke a city that’s more dream than reality. But those places were real, and I knew them well. They, along with so many other spots now gone, comprised the Chicago I loved. Hopefully with this book, and with the help of these excellent writers, I can put a small piece of that city back. I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I do.

Neal Pollack

Austin, Texas

May 2005

99th & Drexel

Never know how you gonna end up. Or when and where. Or why, for that matter. You just know you will. You will end up somehow, somewhere, sometime. That something to think about. It is now, anyway.

I always been an all-purpose guy, game for pretty much whatever you got, long’s it bring me what I want or what I need. I’m mostly known as a robber, stickups and like I help jack an armored truck once, and hold up a whole bunch of stores and shit. But I also commit arson for some guy over insurance money, deliver heavy weight of drugs plenty times. Etc. and so on. Never knock over no bank yet — I always seen myself doing that, but it don’t seem likely now.

I done murders too. Three, to be exact. Usually I do murders for five heavy, my rate. I done one for half price once, as a favor to somebody. But five is my rate for murder, less there’s extra risk or something else hairy about it. Then it take more.

Back starting out, I never think I be doing hits. But my twenties they behind me and I’m trying to branch out. Since this here new hit job’s a cop, one of them “something else hairy” murders, this one takes five up front and another five behind.

Yeah, Katrina’s paying me ten large for this one and I’m happy about that. Plus, doing a cop puts me on a whole new level far as future work goes. Not every hitter will take on a cop job, and for good reason — the reaction is stone fierce, man. Still, set up for this one nice, seems sane enough to me, so it’s perfect, suits my needs.

Specially now, I need the boost. See, a week ago I got out of Joliet after four and a half on a five-to-ten for an armed robbery that went bad. Nobody inside got in my shit though cuz word spread that I’m connected, so I did my time clean and walked early.

I get connected cuz after the heist my car gets slammed by a mail truck and it break up my leg pretty good, so I get nabbed. I go deaf and dumb right away, take the whole weight of it on myself, cop myself a plea for a reduced sentence and no trial, no further investigation. Kind of guy I am. So on my taking the bust, my partner on the heist, gangsta man named Blue who’s driving the other car, he stay free and clear.