Memoirous

“Isn’t that the guy who tried to pee in our closet?” My husband and I were sitting outside Wrigley Field waiting for Bruce Springsteen to take the stage. “Who?” I asked. Herbie had been dead for a decade—or at least I thought. We had been married maybe a month and were living in an old house divided up into six apartments—some with shared bath. It was the early 80s in Chicago in a neighborhood coming back from blight. The remnants were everywhere. In the vacant lots, in the abandoned cars littering the vacant lots, in the boarded-up buildings bordering the vacant lots. It was nothing to see punks walking the sidewalks with tally-rags up to their mouths. At night the gangs came out with baseball bats to beat the tar out of each other, the sky lit up with fires set by landlords burning down those old buildings, the buildings subdivided, with bathrooms down the hall. Every morning I awoke to some new crisis, the ashes of the night before. And the occasional body left i...