This collection of linked stories set in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen in the ’70s and ’80s does a great job of capturing a sense of place. The narrator of the first story puts it like this: “I remember all this vividly, our summer nights, but really, all I can recall is what it felt like. I try to piece together image from that” (2). The Pilsen of this book is a place of gangbangers and guns and drugs, a place where there’s a shootout at a cotillion and where the guy who lives upstairs “would have loud parties that ended up in fistfights at 3 a.m., people falling down our three-flat’s stairs, creative insults being slung in the stairwell, bottles being thrown on the front sidewalk” (7). But it’s also a place of childhood wonder and ease, summer streetscapes with open hydrants, kids playing in the water, competitions between blocks to see whose hydrants could shoot the highest jets. These stories capture the sounds and smells of this place: “frying tacos, boiling pots of garlic-spiced frijoles, cool Lake Michigan breezes transported by miles of sewer pipe,” and “how the expressway sounded from underneath, the high whine of tires, the low drone of truck engines, the shudder of engine brakes” (21, 137). This is a neighborhood of hiding spots and secrets: there’s a great story in which the narrator climbs to a pierogi factory’s roof, where he and a new friend carve out a space for themselves for a time; there’s another great story in which the narrator and his friends eavesdrop on another friend’s mother having sex in the apartment upstairs. But the stories aren’t all realism: there’s one that features a vision of an underground city connected to the aboveground one, and one in which the narrator’s friend can bring back the dead. But I like the realistic descriptive passages best, passages like this:
Up and down Eighteenth Street, the morning delivery trucks worked their horns to announce their backing into docks. The early mist had not yet burned off the neighborhood. The smell of yesterday’s fried food, tacos, gorditas, chicharon, hung in the air. Soon the sun would burn the haze away and allow a fresh day’s worth of fried-food smell to settle over the neighborhood. (55)
Leave a Reply