The fire got rid of some of the hillbillies, but others still lived in Wicker Park. My brother and I always thought the hillbillies were crazy. There was the time when we saw the three Green brothers on the corner of Division and Damen. The youngest one, no more than eight, held a bucket filled with turtles while the other two pulled them out and threw them onto oncoming traffic. The three boys laughed as trucks and buses crushed the turtles under their weight. We watched in horror and fascination for a few minutes until their mother came out swinging a four-foot length of rubber hose at them. “What the hell are you little shits doin’?” Her blood shot eyes bugged out as she whipped the hose at their legs, their asses, and their arms. They screamed in pain and then broke into a run along Division Street.
“You better not come home for dinner because you’re daddy is really gonna give you a real whippin’ for killing his turtles,” she yelled after them.
She turned around and saw us watching her. “What you dirty Pollacks lookin’ at? Want me to give you some too!” She came at us and swung the hose at my brother, but he quickly ducked, narrowly missing her blow. We ran south on Damen. We thought we could hear her footsteps close behind, but we were too scared to turn around and look. We stopped running when we got to Chicago Avenue and doubled over as we sucked in air, our faces wet with perspiration. “Fuckin’ hillbillies” we spat out as we tried to catch our breath.
When the panic attacks started three weeks ago after I had watched that fire across the street from my house, I couldn’t go to work. Luckily I had a couple of weeks of sick time saved up. My boss was understanding about my situation. At that time I wrote for a trade magazine called National Railway. Sidney, the publisher, would check in on me late in the afternoon to see how I was doing. He was concerned, he was fatherly, and he wanted me to get well so I could come back to work. I wanted to tell this nice old man that nobody read his magazine and that no one cared about the state of railroad affairs anymore. I wrote articles, but they were the same old stories he has been publishing for the last 30 years — articles about the lack of government funding for the country’s railway system, the dangers of railroad crossings, poor rail maintenance, and the cutbacks on routes in rural areas. There was never good news for this dying industry. But 78-year-old Sidney loved trains and he often talked about the old days when he first worked for the magazine.