Wednesday, February 06, 2002 6:38:34 PM
Hey, man, bop a roscoe or the hawk is gonna git you!
For reasons unbeknownst to me when I have traveled out of the city of Pittsburgh, three times out of four, I end up in Chicago. I have no particular love for the City with cold winds off the lake that take your breath away, nor do I feel any antipathy. I love Clarence Darrow and Carl Sandburg and Meyer Levin and Willard Motley (Read Knock on Any Door probably five times before I was sixteen - Live Fast, Die Young and Have A Good Looking Corpse!) I am tremendously fond of Second City and lately I tune more and more often via the internet to WGN Radio.
Which really got me thinking last night at about 2:30 in the morning when Johnnie and Steve were arguing about which was the best part of Chicago, the South or the North Side and I could not for the health or life of me get back to sleep.
Friday 11/22/1963 the day of the Kennedy Assassination, Steve, Phil, Jake and I left State College, PA for Chicago. It seemed like a thing to do. Steve got his car which was hidden in a garage (As I recall the drill, first term monkeys had to live on campus and were not supposed have a vehicle. God, the grand gentile repression demanded by education in the early sixties). And we tooled in a plush yet used V8 Mercury toward the west. It was late afternoon and we drove through Ohio into the evening and part of the way through Indiana; glanced at the gas gage which was registering minus five gallons.
We pulled off the Indiana turnpike at South Bend and burped our way to the only open gas station on the four lane highway that feeds into Notre Dame. Pulled to a stop in front of a pump with an attendant holding the gas nozzle in his hand at the ready. Great service! We hadn't yet learned our lesson, nothing is that great. Phil, who was riding shotgun, quickly rolled down the window letting the biting cold air into the car. He looked up at the attendant, who it was clear to us by now had a crazed glaze over his pin prick sized eye balls. The man stuck the gas nozzle in the window and said in his best Foster Brooks voice, "Fill 'er up?” which he proceeded to do. Phil got doused as did the floor mats, Steve quickly flicked his lighted cigarette out the driver's window and Jake an I did our best to get out of the back of the car to stop the maniac. By the time we got out on the apron the man had had his laugh and was duck walking out on to the super highway. The real gas attendant came out of his hidey hole and apologized and we filled up the proper container.
The strangest thing is that several years later I saw the gag on Laugh-in. Who knows maybe the drunk produced the show. A VW bug pulls up to a gas pump, the driver says, "Fill 'er up!" And the attendant sticks the nozzle in the front window and fills up the interior to the brim.
So we drive the rest of the way to Chicago with all the windows open on that very cold weekend and dared not smoke one cigarette. We arrive exhausted and decide to just park and sleep in the car. Somehow, cold, high octane fumes in my nose, I fall asleep with my head propped by the rear passenger window.
In the morning I awake and am staring at the very peculiar looking head of a flamingo whose eyes are focused on me as if I was some sort of prey. After a deep pinch on my arm, I notice that there are more birds behind a galvanized fence. Everyone else in the car is sleeping. Is this a dream, perhaps we are in some tropical environment, Florida? Brazil? Timbuktu? No, it is only a zoo somewhere in Chicago, the empty lot of which we managed to park last traumatic night in the dark.
We did a lot of things in Chicago that weekend, like drive around. Our guide, who we met the next day, I don't recall his name, was a Pittsburgh native but had the irritating habit when telling us to make a left or right turn to say things like Bop A Louie at the next corner or Shoot a Roscoe at the light. I have always assumed that this was Chicago talk. In a younger day I had a friend who ran away in protest from his parents to Chicago, leaving the burden on me, I was the only one to know where he was, when his parents sent the police around asking questions. I didn't crack under the hoses and back room lights. But Art returned when he ran out of money. After that, he would swoop down the street with his dark raincoat flying out behind him crying, "The Hawk Gonna Git You, The Hawk Gonna Git You!" He informed me that the Hawk was the frigid, stiff wind off Lake Michigan. In our sophomore year in high school he disappeared to New York City and didn’t return until ten years later. No police, no knowledge, no tears.
We slept at the YMCA on Wabash Avenue. The noise from the derelicts some seven stories down invaded me as I tried to sleep on my coat on the floor. The sounds of trash cans crashing, the musty dirty smell of the rug and the ache in my ribs from the hard floor put me in a light semi-sleep that lasted the whole long night.
We left Sunday, somewhere in Ohio at about seventy miles an hour; the left rear tire blew as the radio announced that Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald. We changed the tire and hobbled back to State College, PA. Eventually we all either were tossed out of school or had to leave because of atrocious grades. At one point none of us was allowed in the dormitory let alone the rooms of the others. These are stories for another time. I think in light of history that we must have known that Sam Giancana was involved in the Kennedy Assassination. And we were just seekers after the truth that weekend.