Free Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz

can never have in their life unless they was rich.” And so, he goes on to say, they want something that reflects their own sensibilities. They want something unique because there’s not much they can call their own.
    Reed keeps a record of all his murals, but he never signs his work, out of fear that the housing authority might come after him for defacing their property, though truthfully they should have been compensating him for beautification—and, on occasion, for keeping people out of trouble. Once, a woman who lived on the tenth floor asked Reed to paint the city’s downtown skyline on her living room wall so that it would be as if you were looking right through the cinderblock at the John Hancock Building and Sears Tower lit up at night. Reed charged her one hundred fifty dollars. “It’s just like you were looking right outside,” he said. He came back the following week to put some finishing touches on the mural, and the woman asked him for one other thing, to draw a rendering of her, off to the side, with one arm pushing forward, as if she were reaching for the clouds. “It looked as if she was dancing,” he said. Then she made one final request, that he draw her boyfriend, away from her, upside down. “Make sure you put his face in there, so I know it’s him,” she told Reed. So, he drew him upside down just as she’d asked, his feet straight up in the air. When he stepped back, he realized that he’d drawn this woman pushing her boyfriend out the window. “Instead of murdering that guy,” Reed said laughing, “she can take her fantasy out like that.”
    Not all of it makes sense to him. “I hate to tell you,” he said. “Some people got some weird imaginations.” One woman asked him to paint on one wall a rendering of Jesus (Caucasian, of course), and on another wall a man, standing, his pants unzipped, urinating on a tree. “I can’t know what goes on in these people’s heads,” he said. “I would think that that’s wrong, just to have a person on the wall, taking a leak. And then she said, ‘I don’t like that penis, make it bigger.’ So I says, ‘Wanda, they don’t come that size.’ She says, ‘Maybe yours don’t.’ So I did it. Just like she asked.”
    Some of Reed’s work reflects the fact that death is very much a part of this neighborhood. Drug dealers, with their deep pockets, are his modern-day Medicis. One asked Reed to paint scenes of a young man injuring a policeman, an officer getting shot as he exited his squad car, and an officer getting run over. He obliges such requests because the money can be quite good, and they treat him to free beers, but he despises the work. He can only hope that maybe his renderings will be cathartic and thus help forestall future confrontations between the drug dealers and the police. (Once, he heard that the police were looking for the artist who had done these murals, and he made sure to disappear for a while.) More often, though, his customers request tombstones that read REST IN PEACE and include the name of the deceased friend or relative. In one apartment, a gentleman asked him to draw ten of them in his bedroom. “You know what?” Reed says. “I think it really helped a lot of people, kind of calmed them down.”
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    Reed’s now standing on his milk crate as well. He seems to have forgotten his reason for being here, and offers a running commentary on the parade. The city’s mayor, Richard M. Daley, passes by in a convertible, looking unusually relaxed. No mayor has ever missed this parade. In fact, it’s drawn such political luminaries as Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, as well as figures like Muhammad Ali and Nat “King” Cole. Reed’s shaking his head. “I want to ask the mayor, ‘Why’d you do that to Meigs Field the way you did?’ Now you know that