Never a City So Real Page 7

  Lyon, who now works out of DePaul University’s Law School (in the Loop), where she operates a clinic that handles primarily capital murder cases, invited me to join her one morning at 26th Street, where she had to file two rather routine motions in two separate cases. Cases are called at nine-thirty in the morning, so it’s best to get there early to find parking. As you pass through the metal detectors (which have turned up knives disguised as various items, including a lipstick container, a lighter, and a house key), you may spot a jacketless gentleman in white shirt and tie chatting with passersby. He’s the chief judge, Paul Biebel, who makes a point every morning to position himself at the building’s entrance so that he can talk with public defenders, prosecutors, police officers, and sheriff’s deputies. On this particular day, a court administrator pauses to alert Judge Biebel to the rumor that there’s a man in the building practicing law without a license. The judge’s brother, a defense attorney, stops to say hello. (His other siblings—three brothers and a sister—are all in law enforcement.) Two women pass by in T-shirts that have wedding pictures of Tina Ball on them. Ball was the mother of seven and a flagger at a highway construction site; she had been hit and killed by a drunk driver, Thomas Harris, who had four previous DUI convictions. These two women had been friends of Ball, and the message on the back of their T-shirts urged Harris’s conviction for murder. “There’s a passion in this place,” says Biebel.

  Two things are immediately apparent to newcomers here. All the defendants, if they’re not coming directly from the jail and thus appearing in their olive-colored jail garb, are dressed in casual attire. In the summer, men appear in shorts, women in miniskirts. Usually the men arrive in T-shirts, oversized jeans, and basketball shoes. Once, a defendant accused of rape appeared in a black leather jacket with PIMPING AIN’T EASY embroidered on the back. A private investigator who spends much of his time at 26th Street told me, “They’re making a statement: ‘I don’t respect this setting enough to pull out my best outfit.’ ” (The police department’s tactical officers, for their part, are immediately recognizable by their dress as well: usually, shirts and jackets bearing the logos of sports teams.) The other notable quality about the defendants here is that they are overwhelmingly African-American and Hispanic. As one attorney told me, “26th Street makes it look like Chicago’s an entirely minority town.” Roughly eighty-eight percent of the eleven thousand awaiting trial in the neighboring county jail are black and Hispanic. There are those who argue, “Well, that’s who’s committing all the crimes,” but given that an estimated seventy percent of the cases are for possession or selling of narcotics, the racial makeup of the defendants seems rather lopsided. Blacks or Hispanics, after all, are no more or less likely to use drugs than whites. Judge Michael Toomin, who has served twenty-three years on the bench, and who displays a copy of the Magna Carta in his courtroom (along with his high school equivalency certificate), complains that the drug cases “are nickel-and-dime stuff.” What’s more, he says, only forty-five slots are available in rehab programs for defendants with drug problems. “That’s abysmal,” he sighs.

  I wait for Lyon in a third-floor courtroom where the judge has yet to arrive. Two young men lean over the back of their bench and listen intently to another man, who looks to be in his forties. His head is shaved and he has a significant paunch. He’s on trial for heroin possession. “I haven’t been in trouble in five years, but you can’t beat the system,” he lectures, his audience nodding their heads in affirmation. “They give me two years, I’ll take it.” (“Sometimes the prosecution is right,” Lyon says, “which is why God made guilty pleas.”) A woman across the aisle twirls a cigar in her fingers. “Let’s smoke this blunt,” she jokes. The courtroom erupts in laughter.

  Lyon arrives, dressed smartly in a navy blue suit and sensible shoes. When she wants to soften her appearance, she’ll wear pink or baby blue. So that her size doesn’t appear intimidating, she’ll kneel by the side of witnesses or joke about her height with jurors. “Nobody would think twice about a big guy,” she says.

  There are two kinds of courtrooms in the building: old and new. The old courts are deep, cavernous spaces in which the judge’s bench is thirty feet from the first row of spectator benches. You have to lean forward and listen hard to hear the exchanges between the judge and lawyers. The newer courts are smaller, and have a floor-to-ceiling bulletproof glass wall separating the spectators from the proceedings, which are piped in by an audio system. It’s like being in a glass bubble. These rooms are so small that it’s difficult for lawyers to have a conversation among themselves or with their clients without being overheard by the jury. Once, in a robbery case, a frustrated defense attorney put his head down on the table during a cross-examination of a witness. “Wake up, wake up, you got to do something,” his client whispered into his ear. The jury could hear every word. We’re in one of these newer courtrooms, and the court clerk permits me to sit in the jury box along with three uniformed police officers waiting to testify in another case. When the judge arrives, he asks me who I am. I tell him, and assure him that his clerk had okayed my presence. “This is my courtroom,” he scolds. “Not my clerk’s.” Later, during a break, I tell the clerk that perhaps I should go back to the judge’s chambers to apologize. “Apologize?” she laughs. “He’s just got his underpants on too tight this morning.”

  Lyon’s client, Oily Thomas, has been sentenced to seventy years for shooting a rival drug dealer on the city’s South Side. Thomas was identified by four witnesses, and a baseball cap similar to the one worn by Thomas was found at the scene. But two of the witnesses have recanted, and one of them has testified that he was paid cocaine by the victim’s family so that they could pin the murder on Thomas and get him off their turf. Lyon tells me she also has an eyewitness who is willing to testify that she saw the crime, and that she had told the police they had the wrong man. Lyon is trying to get Thomas a new trial; this morning, she asks for a little extra time to respond to the prosecution’s opposition to dismiss the appeal, and her request is granted. Lyon’s cases are procedural today, and so her usual theatrics are absent. She once handcuffed one of her wrists to a pipe along the courtroom wall to demonstrate to a jury how her client had to sit for three days while awaiting an interrogation. Another time, she placed her client in the center of the courtroom, and with masking tape measured off the size of the small room he’d been placed in by the police; then she had all five of the officers who’d been present for the interrogation enter the space. She wanted to demonstrate to the jury the intimidating nature of the setup, but her demonstration proved more effective than she had bargained for when her client started shaking involuntarily.

  On the day I joined her, her other client was facing charges of shooting and killing a liquor store proprietor. It seemed like a straightforward case. Glen Jones had been accused of entering the store with two friends intending to rob it. The store owner grabbed for his pistol, which he was wearing on a holster. Shooting ensued, and as Jones fled, he allegedly fired his gun, killing the owner. It was all caught on videotape. “At first blush, it looks like there’s nowhere to go, that it’s a dead-bang loser,” Lyon tells me. “But things aren’t necessarily as they seem.” Lyon, with the help of a private investigator, is working on the theory that the store owner was dealing in guns, and that Jones and his cohorts had come back to the store to return a defective weapon. An argument ensued, Lyon believes, and the store owner began shooting first. Lyon thinks she can make the case that her client acted in self-defense.

  This is, indeed, a place where the world can seem topsy-turvy. Once, a man accused of double murder chose to represent himself and told the jury that he turned himself in after hearing he was wanted on the TV news. Only problem was he had also argued that he had been in custody at the time of the murder. Nonetheless, the jury acquitted him.

  Of course what you see in this building is a rather small but influential corner of the city; and, it can be a very nasty corner. The street g
angs, in particular, wield enormous influence. Symbols of their power—pitchforks, six-pointed stars, and crowns—are everywhere, etched into courtroom doors and courtroom benches. In 1988, when forty-one-year-old Jeff Fort, leader of the El Rukn gang, and four of his generals were tried for the murder of a rival gang member, Willie “Dollar Bill” Bibbs, the court took extraordinary security precautions, including the construction of a pillbox in the hallway where a deputy sheriff sat armed with a machine gun. They also placed snipers on the rooftop and escorted the judge home each day after court. (Fort was convicted and sentenced to seventy-five years; he was already in prison, serving an eighty-year sentence for directing a terrorist-for-hire plot on behalf of Libya.)

  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 that Nelson Algren had lived down the block, where he had written A Walk on the Wild Side and carried on his transatlantic affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Two years earlier, friends of Algren (he died in 1981) had convinced the city to change the name of the street to Algren Avenue, but residents complained vigorously, not because of any distaste for Algren but because the change of address would pose too much of an inconvenience: It would mean changing their licenses and insurance policies. It was a measure of Algren’s stature here (or lack of it) that the residents won, and the city returned the street to its original name, Evergreen Avenue. Algren, I suspect, wouldn’t have been terribly surprised by this turn of events. He always felt unloved by the city that served as his muse, and in his later years he moved to New York, where he hoped that he might be embraced and appreciated. (Algren’s not the only well-known writer who has moved through Chicago; the city’s best often leave, or simply pass through: Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht.) While in Chicago, Algren had written of the city’s underbelly, of its dispossessed, its prostitutes and junkies, its hustlers and con artists. He lived life hard; he was a drinker and a gambler. His lustful, prickly ballad to the city, Chicago: City on the Make, may be the best thing ever written about this city (along with Carl Sandburg’s collection, Chicago Poems), yet it didn’t find an audience here until Jean-Paul Sartre translated it into French, and it won overseas acclaim. And while he writes in the poem that “You can’t belong to Chicago,” he clearly loved this place. Listen to him on riding the El:

  By nights when the yellow salamanders of the El bend all one way and the cold rain runs with the red-lit rain.

  By the way the city’s million wires are burdened only by lightest snow; and the old year yet lighter upon them.

  When chairs are stacked and glasses are turned and

  arc-lamps all are dimmed.

  By days when the wind bangs alley gates ajar and

  the sun goes by on the wind.

  By nights when the moon is an only child above

  the measured thunder of

  the cars, you may know Chicago’s heart at last.

  There is a monument to Algren. It’s an unremarkable fountain, eighteen feet in diameter, set in a small triangular park where three major thoroughfares meet: Ashland Avenue, Milwaukee Avenue, and Division Street. It is an intersection of the new and the old, of the rich and the poor, of the lively and the lifeless, of the artists and the artful. The park is a refuge for drifters and day laborers, the very slice of the city Algren wrote about, and, indeed, engraved at the foot of the fountain is a quote from City on the Make: “For the masses who do the city’s labor also keep the city’s heart.” But the neighborhood is changing, and in the mornings young men in gray suits and young women in white blouses and somber skirts merge here to catch the bus or the El downtown. The Busy Bee, once the anchor here, is gone, replaced by restaurants that require reservations and bars so well lit you could read a newspaper in them. Families have razed old homes and built anew. After all, neighborhoods in Chicago change direction regularly; in another part of town, for instance, you have Mexican-Americans occupying Pilsen, which was originally a community of Czechs and was named after Plzen, the second largest city in Czechoslovakia. But in Wicker Park it’s unclear who the insiders are and who the outsiders are, and so you have Spring, one of the city’s posher, trendier restaurants, at one corner of the neighborhood, and Polska Restauracja Podhalanka, which has been around for twenty years, at another. It’s as if the neighborhood is simultaneously moving both backward and forward in time.

  Robert Guinan is an artist whose inspiration, like Algren’s, comes from the street, from the people who are seen but not heard, and for that reason I had wanted to meet him. He suggested that we rendezvous just a block west of Triangle Park at Rite Liquors on Division Street, the bar where he had spent many years drinking and sketching. This is Algren’s old turf. I waited beneath the tavern’s tired-looking green awning, watching its collection of neon signs—BUDWEISER, GO BEARS, a green shamrock, DRINK STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE—toss flickers of light on the cracked sidewalk. A thick-legged elderly woman entered Rite Liquors, and I could hear a voice from inside announce good-naturedly, “Here come
s that dancing gigolo.” “What?” the woman growled. “What y’a say?” The man and his friend chuckled. Then a man who was missing a good number of teeth and wearing a T-shirt that read LICK IT SLAM IT SUCK IT came up and offered to sell me a sledgehammer. It was wrapped in electrical tape and looked as worn as he did. When I declined, he flung the mallet over his shoulder and tried the other customers in the bar, who turned down his offer as well.

  Rite Liquors is like a spinster among the young and the beautiful. Directly across the street are two new stores: Smack, a clothing boutique, and Bamboo Nail Spa. There’s a Starbucks on the corner, and down the street a sushi bar and the Smoke Daddy, a rib joint (which despite the fact that it is relatively trendy has some of the best ribs in the city, along with live blues bands). But Rite Liquors refuses to give ground. Patrons, mostly men, still beat the bar’s owner to work, waiting under the awning at seven a.m. for the doors to open and for the beer and whiskey to flow.

  “It’s still here.” The voice has a warbly quality to it. Guinan, who at sixty-nine is slightly built and light-footed, has sneaked up behind me. His face, which looks alternately dour, amused, and baffled, is almost cartoonish-looking in its pliability; Guinan has the expressiveness of a mime. Guinan was once a regular at Rite Liquors, where he would come to sketch two patrons in particular. One was a young blonde bartender, Dorota, who had come from Poland just a few years earlier, and who complained to Guinan that his sketches made her appear unhappy. (The bartenders at Rite Liquors still tend to be recently arrived young Polish women.) The other was Loretta, an African-American woman who had worked in a commercial printing facility for years until her hands mysteriously broke out in a bad case of eczema. She was on disability when Guinan met her, drinking to fill the void in her life. Embarrassed by the unsightliness of her hands, she wore black leather gloves, which made her look exotic among the young men in torn leather jackets and the old-timers in frayed shirts.