Free Chicago by Brian Doyle Page A

the city, its undertones and foundational colors, the bones beneath the shining flesh. It seemed to me there were far more stories in and among the alleys, where I found the more unusual residents of various species, including once, to my astonishment, a badger, although that might have been someone’s pet.
    Alleyness, you might say, is one of the things I remember best about Chicago. For all that some things were true of all alleys—narrowness, shabbiness, the occasional rat the size of a bear, a dank dark smell you knew had been there for a century and would be there for another century—there was a curious disparity in alleys according to sections of the city, and an odd inversion of expectations. Downtown in the Loop, and in the wealthy Near North sections of the city, where commerce was king and the brightest wealthiest residences and businesses held sway, the alleys were generally terrifying, and twice I barely evaded ruffians with knives and poor attitudes; whereas there were warm and alluring alleys in the toughest raggediest neighborhoods to the south and west, neighborhoods where no one spoke American at all except cops and bus drivers. I remember one great alley on the west side where two brothers had built a brick oven for roasting lamb right into the wall, designed in such a way that the glorious smell of roast lamb with garlic and onions drifted out of the alley and snared passersby who could not resist at all and entered the alley sometimes with their eyes closed, dimly remembering something from their childhoods, perhaps an aunt’s kitchen, or a redolent church basement, or a grandfather roasting shish kebab in the back yard in the wild sunlight.
    Several alleys I explored had people living in them, in lean-to shelters or even little sheds, though no domicile I saw was bigger than your average garden shed. One alley on the South Side had a tarpaulin ceiling and several hammocks strung deftly high in the air, accessible only by a fire escape ladder; that particular alley also had a beautiful little fire-pit, at which the residents cooked sausages for sale at a cart in the street. Another alley, to the northwest, had been bricked over so meticulously at either end that you could not easily tell the alley from the adjoining walls, unless someone pointed out the infinitesimal vertical line that betrayed a small door. I was curious to enter that alley but there was a deeper law at play there and the man who showed me the door walked another couple of blocks with me silently before he suggested that I forget the alley and especially the door, which I have done until now.
    I suppose the one alley I think of first when I think of Chicago’s alleys is one on the north side, a few blocks past the basketball court where I played with the Latin Kings and the Latin Eagles. I was walking home from a blues club one night and heard music coming from an alley and I poked in to see what was up and I found a small man playing a tiny piano the size of a suitcase. He was surrounded by children, a good seven or eight of them, and no one said a word or moved a muscle until he was finished with a long lovely song. He had a thin quavering voice and he murmured more than he sang but he played the piano beautifully and somehow the combination of his gentle voice and the clarity of the piano notes was mesmerizing. I didn’t know the song but one couplet from it struck me forcibly and I sang it all the way home that night: there’s a song that will linger forever in our ears / o hard times come again no more . Much later I discovered those were lines from a song by the American composer Stephen Foster, who died only with three cents in his pocket and a scrap of paper on which he had written the words dear friends and gentle hearts .
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    One day I sat with Edward and charted out who lived where in the building, from apartment 4F, which was Ovious and his mother, down to 2A, which was the