Chapter Twenty-Nine

- Chicken Sticks -

Life changed.

Short Attention Span couldn’t handle waiting anywhere -- not an airport, not this trip. To satisfy its hunger for movement, I had stopped checking baggage altogether and bounced around terminals in search of the first flight that would get me where I was going. These guerilla travel tactics paid off with an unexpected dividend at O’Hare. In those pre-high alert security days, I could get to an airport at the last minute and still get on a flight. This last minute was literally the last minute before they closed the door to the jet way on the last flight out and my seat had been given away to a standby.

“Please,” I begged the girl behind the counter. There was no time to waste, so my first pitch came fast and straight down the middle.

“Look, I just told my girlfriend that I love her for the first time and she’s waiting for me in L.A.” There’s never been a puppy dog with more sincere eyes than mine just then. Lady Luck had put me in front of the only sympathetic employee in the entire airline industry.

“That’s the best one I’ve heard all day.” She smiled and handed me a ticket for the last empty seat -- in first class!

If ever I’d wondered what the big deal about first class was, I wondered no more. For the first flight ever, I didn’t feel like I should have a bell hanging around my neck and a brand on my ass. Oh, what space! The Knees on my average sized frame weren’t jammed into the seat ahead of me and the woman in the Nicole Miller suit next to me had plenty of room to work on her laptop without jamming her elbows into mine. It didn’t even bother me that I was at the window instead of the aisle. The food was actually edible. But the best part -- free Air Marys. I had four cozy hours to relax, sip my cocktails and let my mind wander.

The Muse made an unannounced return and coughed up my first real happy songs. Throwing those up was a little uncomfortable, but nothing another free drink couldn’t fix. The Mind moseyed out the window and into the dark clear night, picking up bits and pieces of the topography seven miles below. How odd the world looked -- totally different than the nights I used to wander the face of the earth on foot. The Memory tripped and landed on the thought that most kids I knew lived near something that at least resembled a park.

Ludington grade school sat on 84th street, on the north side of the Great Divide, a.k.a. US Interstate 94. The kids who lived east of school (including half of the Gang Of Four) had Dyer Field ­ not really a park, but its two baseball diamonds and tennis courts sufficed. Those who lived west of Ludington, but again north of the Great Divide were inexplicably shipped off to the dreaded Burbank elementary, miles and miles east. Their reward for the inconvenience was Cannon Park (prettier than Dyer, with its gentle sloping hill, but too small to compete with real parks), about a half mile north of the freeway on 92nd street.

My park was a short stretch of no man’s road called Adler Streetthat spanned between 84th and 92nd. The games my friends and I played were played on the concrete road. (Cue the violins.)

The railroad tracks at the end of the block-long cul-de-sacs extending south off of Adler marked the end of civilization and the beginning of the city of West Allis. One chain link fence and about fifty feet of grass north of the street, western pioneers commuted to downtown Milwaukee along the Great Divide.

On my childhood nights, the event of the streetlights coming on functioned as the neighborhood alarm clock up and down the Adler Street Park. The moment those lamps sputtered and flickered to life thirty feet up, all games ended and kids up to a certain age headed home. Depending on your good conduct rating, that moment was either an absolute you-will-be-in-this-house or a friendly reminder that it was time to wrap things up and call it a night. The Park had closed.

I was always a night owl at heart. Long after the streetlights came on, dinner was served, and the television went bye-bye, I spent hours staring out my window, wandering through the shadowy streets that existed only in my imagination.

Then sometime around the fourth or fifth grade, I hit a magic moment when curfew began its slow but steady creep forward into the night, progressing later each summer till around age twenty-eight when I lived two thousand miles away and my parents would finally stop commenting on my coming and going altogether.

But till then, the defining right of passage into adulthood on the Park was admission into a friendly game of “Ditch” -- a revved-up variant of Hide-And-Seek that sprawled across every yard on the block (except for mean old Mr. Firestein’s). The real draw of “Ditch,” though, was that it was played only under cover of night, bestowing it with the distinction of being an ‘adults’ only game -- strictly off limits to mere children. Once played, you ‘ditched’ your innocence for all time. Childhood became a place you visited in memories and embarrassing photographs.

I’d played only a couple games of “Ditch” before it lost most of its appeal. The problem was one of timing (even then). The kids who invented the game all turned sixteen the year of my induction. These were the cool kids that my friends and I longed to hang out with. Becoming equals with them was the whole point in playing. We’d waited years for our chance. Then the cool kids got their driver’s licenses and poof! Off they went to do whatever it was you did in cars. “Ditch” was ditched.

So there I was, finally allowed out of the house after dark, and fuck all to do. Staring into the vast horizon before me, my natural wanderlust took control. Discreetly, so as not to arouse suspicion, I ventured out of the confines of the Park to neighboring neighborhoods. First, down to the east side of my grade school and the mysterious streets that sprouted off Honey Creek. I’d never fully investigated the places where my classmates from the other side lived and played. Dyer Field would eventually become site of much teenage corruption, but for now it was a curiosity I surveyed from a distance, hovering outside the fence at the far side of the baseball diamonds, watching the locals play their games.

Alternate nights, I spent hours on the 92nd street overpass, watching the cars speed along the Great Divide to Milwaukee’s miniature version of a downtown, lights a-twinkle in the eastern horizon. A few attempts were made to homestead at Cannon Park, but I was designated an unwelcome interloper. Altercations with the Burbank guys weren’t worth the effort. Cannon became available to me only after Burbank, Ludington, and all the other grade schools fed into junior high and I proved myself worthy.

It just occurred to me this very instant that the word “Cannon” had played such a big part in my life. Interesting (maybe only to me).

Days turned into weeks, months, and years. Every night I prowled ever further into the city, exploring new streets, bridges, and alleys. Before I got my first car (a hand-me-down ’71 Rambler with a very rude nickname), my boundaries expanded (exponentially once I hit my teens) till I was walking eight miles every night, in all four seasons -- anything to get out of the house and away from the parents.

Walking was liberating. The hours I spent out on the streets cleared my head of all those angry young thoughts that threatened the lives of those around me. Walking was good for me, good for society.

The ultimate route started east of the Park to 84th street, north past the old grade school to Honey Creek. Honey Creek wrapped around the backside of Dyer Field. If nothing was happening at Dyer, I’d continue along Honey Creek into Wauwatosa. (In high school I messed with the mind of a chiropractor’s daughter from Wauwatosa. Hey! She was the Winnie-the-Pooh girl! She lives happily in Colorado with her husband and four kids.) Honey Creek took me all the way to Jacobus Park (almost a real park with real trees -- actually a series of picnic areas lining the creek), eventually spilling out onto 60th street (counting the blocks?), where I’d double back to the footbal/play fieldat my high school (think Halloween, think Number 2). If nothing held my interest at the high school (Back in the day, people chose the neighborhoods they lived in by many factors, one of which was the school they wanted their kids to attend. This put their kids in the vicinity of their school, often walking distance. Imagine not having to spend two or more hours a day on a bus and actually being neighbors and friends with your classmates. What a concept!), I’d cut across th grass field the other side of the school and head past the neighborhood tavern/bowling alley (now owned by one-fourth of the Gang of Four), and follow the high tension power lines to 70th street.

If enough demons had left my brain, I’d simply head west on O’Connor (the service road that straddles the north side of the Great Divide -- Kerney is on the south.), back to 84th and be home in half an hour. If I still needed to avoid my family, I’d push on further south on 70th street, and walk passive-aggressively past Number 2’s townhouse (!). Still in my shy phase, I’d never actually knock on her door. But if she happened to be out on the front step, sharing a smoke with her mom (poor girl couldn’t help her white trash lineage), I’d visit.

Just south of 2’s place, 70th street crosses the same railroad tracks that ran behind my house and mark the border at West Allis. Once across the border, you pass a number of small, faceless, and nameless factories and foundries that produce god knows what. Actually, my dad would have known what if I’d cared to speak to him. He’d worked at most of them one time or another, coming home with demoralizing grime under his nails and stinking from the sweat of fruitless labor. I hated him for that, but I have no idea why.

The residential streets surrounding those anonymous life-suckers are lined with rows of pre-war working class homes affectionately called Milwaukee Bungalows. They’re small and most have needed renovation for years, and they have these gorgeous dark wood details you just can’t get anymore. Not till I went to London did I realize just how strong the European influence was in my hometown. The German, Italian, and Polish immigrants who settled the town brought with them the only aesthetic they knew. One area that aesthetic manifested was in the architecture of the quaint neighborhoods I stalked in my youth.

As you walk through these quite side streets, every few blocks you come across a ‘front-room’ tavern. Otherwise indistinguishable from the other bungalows, they are set apart by the electric “Pabst” sign hung out front, glowing bright in the otherwise dim night. The front room of these homes had been literally converted into a bar, leaving the back half of the house as living quarters for the owners. The front-room taverns don’t exactly draw the crème-de-le-crème of Milwaukee society. No, these are the watering holes of the local alcoholics on a budget who while away the nights on cheap tap beer, shots of no-name whiskey, and Marlboro Lights. Hey, it’s a life.

The owners of the front-room taverns viewed the legal drinking age as more suggestion than law, so the money a well-behaved fifteen year-old laid down was the same color as that of the forty-five year-old regulars. I had a year or so to go before my cash took on the right shade, so I pressed on past the huge Allis-Chalmers (wait a minute) plant (now a weird strip mall), where they made big red metal things with gigantic tires, and finally into downtown West Allis (aha!).

Those poor old shops, diners, and bars that line Greenfield Avenue. They try, they really do, but it’s an economy that has just refused to flourish since the seventies. Even in my early years I wondered how in the hell they kept their doors open. It had to be a mutual support circle of cash-passing: The grocery store supports the hardware store that supports the five and dime that supports the office supply that supports the bank. They all live on the same cash circulating amongst them. No one generates any new money.

Eight or so depressing blocks later, I had my choice of final stretches: I could a) take the delinquent route, which meant jumping the fence at the state fair park and cutting diagonally back to 84th and Schlinger -- the name of that street alone was worth not living in West Allis. That route also called for some covert tracking to avoid getting busted by the rent-a-cops who would, in turn, turn you over to the real thing. It was one of those activities I had to be in the mood for.

Or I could b) stay on Greenfield to 84th, hang a right and walk along the state fair park the legal way.

Or, if I felt really ambitious, I would c) take Greenfield all the way up to 92nd street, cross north past Lafollette Park (A semi-park. Though the Germans, Poles, and Italians were the major émigrés, Milwaukee minored in French.), dip under the railroad tracks back into civilization, finally dropping back down Adler till I was home.

“Flight attendants please prepare for arrival.” The Captain’s voice bellowed over the jet’s loudspeakers, plucking me off of memory lane and dropping me back into first class. I gave the woman next to me one of those polite but not really friendly smiles and stretched the skinny little chicken sticks I call legs. Rubbing the Thighs, I felt how muscular they are.

Walking.

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