The couple downstairs fought on New Year’s Eve day. I didn’t hear individual words, just angry voices. They fought a lot. I didn’t have anyone to fight with that day. My most recent girlfriend had recently Gone Insane and Moved to Texas. Not that I am prone to exchange angry words, or fight, anyhow. There’s something in anger that kills part of the person to whom it’s directed, forever, I think. But I was mad. We’d always done music on New Year’s Eve, maybe something at the Lounge Ax, Smashing Pumpkins at Metro, even some cowboy band in a bar in Park City. I didn’t feel up to going out alone, or asking someone for a date I didn’t really want. So I was going to stay home and pout, and sulk, and maybe listen to the neighborhood fireworks at midnight. I’d never heard the New Year’s fireworks in this neighborhood.
This neighborhood. That was another thing. I’d moved to this semi-dicey neighborhood because of that girlfriend. I couldn’t really be angry at her for that, though, just myself. Another questionable life choice made with a woman involved, like many before, probably many to come. People at work asked me if I was crazy when I moved here. But it’s not that bad, I don’t think. My building’s nice, and the rent is relatively cheap, and those are good excuses. Mostly it’s a working class place, where moms walk their babies in strollers and take their kids to the bus stop, old ladies walk their dogs, and people go to work every morning, and its okay, I tell myself. Weirdest of all, the white people come and go like ghosts.
Sure, the first summer I was here there was a domestic scene on the street, when an angry dad chased his wife around and around the block, cursing her, and hitting her, while the kids pleaded with him to stop, and the wife screamed, and finally the police came. Then two years ago a little girl was killed on the next street when a drug dealer’s bullet missed her boyfriend. One guy at work always asks me if there’s any kids left alive in my neighborhood after that one, but I don’t really think it’s that funny. And last year another little girl two streets over was shot in the leg by a man who was angry and despondent about the loss of his job, and who subsequently killed himself. And the gang graffiti appears overnight on the walls, and sometimes the gangs are on the street late at night, and you have to watch very carefully where you drive. But that’s not so bad in a city like Chicago, and besides, in this neighborhood, the white people come and go like ghosts.
Around about midnight I first heard the fireworks, loud booms from M-80’s and cherry bombs and such or so it seemed, and opened my window so I could hear the kids banging on pans, and the strings of Black Cats and Zebras and Lady Fingers, like when I was a kid in Montana.
bambambambambambam BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM bam bam BAMBAM BAMBAM Pop! Pop! Pop! and on and on for minutes and minutes, staccato sequences from this way and that. I slowly realized, though, it wasn’t Black Cats I was hearing. It wasn’t fireworks. The explosion report sequences were too regular, too distinctly defined, and too quickly done. I was transfixed then by the sound of the different voices, low voices, fast voices, slow voices, high voices, loud voices, sharp voices, so many voices, and forgot about being mad at my Insane Ex-girlfriend and just listened by the window, oblivious to what might come through it. I listened to all the angry voices talking back and forth to each other, talking to the city, talking to the neighborhood, talking to me.
Author/Copyright: Tiger, of tigerwhip.com fame Date written: 05/05/1994