Teenreads.com -- A LIFE WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES by Stephen Elliot

A LIFE WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES
Stephen Elliot
MacAdam/Cage Publishing
Young Adult
ISBN: 0967370175
186 pages

3. Adlai Stevenson House

Whenever I am searching I am searching for you. I look for you first in every crowd. Every image is a replacement, every doorway a path back home. When I am with you the world is quiet. I drown in you. I stare in people's faces searching for your eyes. I keep letters in a book that I mean to send to you when I find out where you are.

The grass is green and beautiful but covered in a thin layer of frost. I speak into a cup, the steam and the smell of chocolate rising over my face. It is early in the morning and the houses are all sleeping and the only sound is the sound of a car or two and a bird. An hour later they come back for me with their flashing blue lights. Surly police officers, a blue and white car, the logo near the tail lights reads 'To Serve and Protect.' I dump the last of the chocolate into the bushes. I sit on the front steps of someone's house wearing a pair of black denim pants trying to sort out my day. The man takes me by the arm and pulls me towards the car and a sharp pain shoots through my shoulder and then he pushes me in the back door. These cars, with their dark blue seats and plastic floors, I've been in them plenty of times before.

They drive me down to the Robert Taylor Homes away from our toolshed. I look out of the window for Tanya along the Dan Ryan freeway and in the trains that speed by the meridian. I search the blur of faces. I look for her in the buildings and the girders and the passing cars. I knock on the grating separating me from the two men in the front seat. "Where is she?" I ask. The driver doesn't turn around and the other man stares at me with cold brown eyes, like he is going to kill me and bury me beneath the Dan Ryan freeway, under the trains and the buildings and Comiskey Park where I will never be found. I open my mouth and run my hand behind the seat. Sometimes there are drugs there, when the police don't pat somebody down, a last ditch effort to hide the evidence. As we drive the buildings break down. We come to a place where the people look away when they see the police car. We arrive on a broken street at a three story brick compound that is drowned out by the immensity immediately behind it, the towering Robert Taylor Homes.

The Robert Taylor Homes are the largest housing projects in the world. They tower over the Dan Ryan freeway like broken teeth, with miles of chain link fence casing in the outdoor stairwells. Black faces press against the fence; laundry hangs from it. Black stains mark the grey cement walls around the window frames. Their shadows fall across the abandoned North-South traintracks, own every unlit street light, swallow Garfield Park all the way to Sunset Church. They own State Street from 25th to 65th, forty blocks of anarchy with tens of thousands of tenants. Gym shoes hang from telephone lines like flags. Black and blue for Royals, black and red for Vice Lords, black and gold for Gaylords. The gym shoes blow back and forth in the wind on breezy days. The fortress liquor stores line up across from the Robert Taylor Homes; they are more common than fire hydrants, they sell plastic cups full of whiskey to grown men. The men shoot dice along the cracks in the sidewalk lit by the glow of trashcan fires. Dark lines in their faces crease in anticipation. Small bits of change float from the government's hands onto Robert Taylor's stairwells in the form of welfare, social security. The change is not enough. It falls through the fingers. The buildings crumble, the cement is layered with cracks. Along the Robert Taylor Homes like tufts of grass there are churches, small government buildings, outreach projects, schools and basketball courts with bent rims. State Street is four lanes of black tar. Occasionally an automobile lumbers its length. Otherwise, there are vacant lots with abandoned cars growing like bushes in the dirt and the rocks. The streets all dead-end, so unless you know your way it is nearly impossible to get out. Children sit on the guardrails and throw stones at rats. Grown men and women walk around in underclothes in the summer and blankets in the winter. The population laughs at bus stops, hides under dimming hallway lights. Many have gone mad with poverty. Hidden in the shadows of these enormous buildings, these concrete mountains, among post offices covered in barbed wire and the green glass of broken bottles, there are a smattering of group homes where the state hides the children when there is nowhere else to go.

They hide me in a tuft of grass called Adlai Stevenson House after a man that was almost president for boys that never will be. Stevenson House sits next to the Robert Taylor Homes like a mole on a person's face. Stevenson House holds the worst the system has to offer, the twelve-year-old murderers, now seventeen and freshly released. The kids who went to juvi for something and their parents wouldn't pick them up. The heroin house rescue missions. It's all here. Carefully hidden. Compared to the Taylor Homes it is tiny but inside it is crowded. They would have taken me back to Reed, but time has run out; the paperwork has been lost; fourteen days have passed. Rules of the game: If you can get away from anywhere and stay gone for over two weeks they staff you out and you were never there. They couldn't put us back in Reed so they carted Tanya off to a prison somewhere for killing her parents and they put me in a group home in the Taylors called Stevenson House. I learn to exist as best I can.

In the Robert Taylor Homes I get my first tattoo, a large dagger on my left shoulder blade. My roommate Cateyes gives it to me with a sterilized pin and a small bottle of Indian Ink. We are badly drunk while he does it. The dagger is crooked. It is different from the gang symbols that mark everyone else's arms. Stevenson House is covered with blue ink tattoos. I get beat up, I have the shoes stolen off my feet at gunpoint at the Garfield train station and I walk home in the snow wearing a pair of socks. In Stevenson House we stay up all night shooting dice, emulating the men down on their knees in front of the liquor store. The staff leaves us to our own devices; we occupy the upstairs, they occupy the downstairs. We play dice for T-shirts, notebooks, handmade pipes, bullets, sunglasses, Adidas, picks and combs, whatever we have. We make like the best of the neighborhood, holding the dice in our palm, blowing on them for luck saying things like, "C'mon mamma. Be with me now." When someone loses all their clothes and knives and whatever else they have they throw a fit, kicking the wall, screaming at the ceiling. But it is all an act. We never fight over a game of dice. The projects are loaded with violence, but not when men are throwing dice.

I don't bother going to school. Nobody does. School is a myth, a fine place to get shot. I hang out with Craig and John and Craig protects me from becoming a teardrop under somebody's eye. Craig's mother comes for him every Sunday dressed in nice clothes and takes Craig off to church. I write poems that John performs as rap songs to everyone else. I write funny rhymes for John, "I forgot about cookies, I had a bunch, and that was just for sixth period lunch," and everybody laughs and claps. Then Craig is taken off in a car with flashing blue lights and John is too fat to protect me and I prepare myself to be sliced up.

I meet once a week with my counselor, Willie. To get there I walk along State Street almost to the trains at sixty-third. His office is on the ground floor of one of the Taylor buildings. He always welcomes me with a big smile and we sit down to play a game of chess. His chessboard is expensive looking with marble pieces. Sometimes, while we play, there is a knock at the door and Willie hands someone a package or takes a package and casually throws it on his desk. After they take Craig away I tell him that I'm going to get cut, then I trade a pawn across the center of the board. He puts his fingers together. "Let me see what I can do, Paul. I'd hate to have no one to play chess with. Maybe we can keep you alive for a few more months." He takes my pawn from the queen side with his bishop. I am in trouble now.

In the Robert Taylor Homes if you kill someone you tattoo a teardrop under your eye. The guys that hang out in front of Willie's office have chains of them running down their faces onto their necks, noble savages, hungry, feared. Others stand on the street corners, arms folded, tattooed tears streaming down their faces. You make the decision in the Taylors. Once you kill someone you can never go back. I make the decision, I take my beatings. I never kill anyone.

Six months have passed since they took Tanya away and stuck me in the Robert Taylor Homes.

Yesterday I found out I would be leaving the Robert Taylor Homes. I was not the only one. I watch from a corner of the room in the dark. I see Cateyes get out of his bed, tuck a knife in his pocket. He walks over by my bed, his muscles taut, his chest slashed by moonlight. I can smell him. I see my bed from the dark corner of the room. I see the sweat come to his half naked body. I study the silhouette of his knife, the moonlight reveals scars, hard puffy marks along his ribs. Then he walks out of the room. Water runs in the bathroom down the hall. He comes back in, puts his knife in a drawer, and goes to sleep. I stand in the corner all night long.

The Robert Taylor homes constitute an entire country. Today I am leaving that country, transferred up north as if by some act of God, to a nicer home, a specialized group home in a nice neighborhood with a front lawn. I don't know who ordered it or why. Some benevolent social worker in a DCFS office maybe slipped the pencil, misread a form. My file was transferred, I was moved, my yellow envelope switched from one drawer to another. Today it is over. From now on, it will be quiet.