Peoria Street Memories

Peoria Street Memories

Sam Weller, an old classmate and Current Author and Writing instructor at Columbia College, has proposed on Facebook a 500 word a day writing regimen towards a novel for the summer. It’s supposed to start on May 17 and go through August. I don’t know about a novel or writing on Sundays, but I’m starting now and I’m writing about Peoria Street in the early to mid 50’s where I lived. It will be a fantastic exercise and exploration of material I’ve only dabbled in.

Whatever material comes out of there, it will be very gritty and bottom-end working class. It was a block of immigrants, hillbillies, and a lot of relatives in a very industrial neighbor hood. One of my friend’s mother was unwed and of dubious background, possibly a hooker. I lived in the shadow of a shoe factory, across from a big cinder covered truck lot. Across Huron was a big cinder pile guarded by a alcoholic we called Old Pete, who liver in a six by six shack with his always pregnant mutt Trixie. At the other end of the block was a scrap metal yard and just beyond that was a big ditch that would become the Eisenhower Expressway.

There’s a lot of stories from back then and it will be very interesting to see what comes up, how much I’ll remember when I start looking at it. Like right now I can see Youdoc’s mother, a big boned polish immigrant with a babushka and peasant clothes, out behind their flat next to Pumpilio’s truck lot. She standing before an empty, over turned fifty-gallon drum swinging a hand axe with both hands and chopping wood on top the drum.

Byron’s older brother Robert, tall, thin, half Puerto Rican, maybe twelve years old, comes running at her. “Hit my Little brother,” he shouts, swinging at her. She drops the axe and grabs her broom, standing her ground to fend him off with the straw end, yelling back at him in Polish. “How do you like? How do you like it?” Robert grabs the broom and yanks it from her and starts swatting at her, chasing her around the drum. She’s covering the back of her head, blubbering now, and flees to her flat. Robert throws the broom at the door. He comes back to the drum and snatches up the axe as a trophy. “I’ll take that.”

Sometime after that a bunch of us were sitting on old car tires we used to push and roll for fun. Youdoc was sitting on one and I didn’t have one. He got up and left and I sat on the tire he was sitting on. He came back and told me to get off his tire. I told him he had left it and now it’s mine. He left again and then came back with an old mop handle and whacked me in the side. I grabbed the stick from him and chased him home. I found a paper bag and filled it full of dog shit and rocks and threw it through his front window.

About five years ago I learned Youdoc was a Jewish name. It was somewhere about 1958 when I threw the bag of shit through their window.