The first time I saw her, she was brushing her teeth. She had just moved in with her boyfriend in the unit below me. It was a U-shaped apartment building in Albany Park and my kitchen window was on the wall that was adjacent to their bathroom window. She always stood for a long time in front of the mirror as she brushed her teeth. I was surprised they never put a curtain or shade over the window. I don’t think she and her boyfriend knew how easy it was for me to view them. That was the only room in their apartment where I could see them. I would watch her at night as she stood by the sink, tossing her long black hair away from her face while she brushed with vigorous strokes. I never saw anyone brush their teeth so hard.<\/p>\n
Even though their bathroom window was small, I was able to see the profile of her face and her body about down to her knees. Sometimes she wore underwear, but most often she was nude. I never made it a habit of waiting for her because there was no predictable rhythm to her habits. At random points throughout the day and evening, I would look through my kitchen window to see if she was there. Most often the bathroom was dark, but then there were those times when I would see her standing by the sink. I would always turn off the light in my kitchen and stand in the dark to watch her.<\/p>\n
On some nights I felt disappointed when I saw her boyfriend standing in his boxer shorts brushing his teeth. He also used quick vigorous strokes. I always thought he was brushing his teeth in an angry manner. His whole elbow would bounce up and down and his biceps bulged as he brushed away. I always thought using a toothbrush was merely wrist action.<\/p>\n
I had been watching her for the last three weeks. It was during the time that I had to stay home from work. I told my boss, Sidney, that I had some mental health issues and I needed a little break. It was panic attacks. For three weeks I stayed at home when the panic attacks started. I only felt safe inside my apartment. I was always prone to some minor panic attacks in the past, but they were never bad enough to keep me at home. The major attacks had started three weeks ago when I saw a fire burn through an apartment building that was across the street from where I lived. It was a large apartment building where all the druggies in the neighborhood lived. I, along with other neighbors, was convinced that most of the crime in the neighborhood was committed by the people who lived in that building. That night I stood on the sidewalk and watched the fire blaze through the building, flames leaping through a number of windows on the first floor while on the upper floors people screamed for help. A few fire trucks rumbled down the street and the roar of their engines vibrated my chest while the pitch of their sirens made my eyes tear. As I watched the scene, a panic grew within me that made me feel light headed. I felt a strong sense of urgency to get back to my apartment. It was difficult to walk the few feet back to my building because my knees felt rubbery and I could hardly breathe. By the time I got home, I had a full-blown panic attack. My heart pounded so hard that I felt like I was going to die. Since that incident, I have felt a panic attack coming on whenever I tried to leave the house.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I remember feeling the same way when I was a kid growing up in Wicker Park and a fire broke out in an apartment building a couple doors from my folk’s house. My brother and I called the building “hillbilly hotel” because all of the 12 units were occupied by hillbillies. We thought they were all crazy. The women wore a lot of make up and had big hair. The men had slicked-back hair and wore tight jeans with pointed-toed boots. Their kids ran around in dirty t-shirts and torn jeans. They all talked in a loud and boisterous manner. On hot summer nights, my brother and I, from our second-story back porch, would look into the apartment of Marlene Knuckles. She always left the shades up and the windows open. We were able to watch her move through the rooms in her black bra with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. She had long red hair and would always blow on her nails in a nervous manner as if they had just been manicured. Most of the time there was nothing to see but the blue light of the TV set filling her living room. But there was one summer night when we saw her walking around topless. In an absent manner she started to finger one of her nipples near the bedroom window. My brother and I wanted to hoot and shout that we finally caught a glimpse of a woman\u2019s nipples. Maybe we did let out a hoot or two because Marlene stuck her head out and saw us both hanging over the railing.<\/p>\n
“What are you little fuckers lookin\u2019 at?” We ducked down and tried to hide behind the railing but that seemed to make her angrier. “You think you can hide from me! I’ll kick your skinny asses if I ever catch you on the street!”<\/p>\n
We ran inside our house and talked about our impending doom because she dated Charley Dart who also lived in the building. Many people in the neighborhood feared him. He was a big muscular hillbilly who stole cars, and also sold fireworks to kids in the neighborhood. Some say he was also dealing in drugs. He sold fireworks to my brother and me, so in his honor we called him the Hillbilly King.
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A couple of weeks after we saw Marlene topless, we saw her and Charley argue in front of their building. It escalated to the point where he slapped her face so hard that it made her red hair fly. Charley then walked a few steps to his car and opened the trunk and pulled out a lead pipe. He came toward Marlene like he was going to swing the pipe at her head, but she stood her ground with her head defiantly cocked to the side as if daring him to hit her. Charley looked at her and hissed, “You\u2019re nuthin\u2019 but a fuckin’ bitch.” He then headed toward her old yellow Bonneville that was parked in front. Gritting his teeth, he slammed the pipe a few times into the windshield and shards of glass filled the interior of the car. He also knocked out the passenger windows and the back window as well. In a sarcastic manner Marlene clapped her hands in applause while she said to him in her tough voice, “You’re a real man Charley, a real man!” Neighbors soon came out and gathered to watch. A couple of people thought of calling the police, but the general mood was that nobody cared if one hillbilly was hurting another hillbilly.<\/p>\n
One neighbor made a joke to my father that the hillbilly hotel should be burned down. Other neighbors also gave their opinions. “This trash is bringing down the whole block.” \u201cThey keep us up all night with their music and shouting.\u201d \u201cWhy don\u2019t they go back to the hills where they belong?\u201d<\/p>\n
A week after Charley destroyed Marlene\u2019s car, the hillbilly hotel was ablaze with yellow flames. My brother and I stood on the sidewalk with my father as we watched the firemen work futilely to put the fire out. We watched the flames eat away at Marlene’s apartment, the flames angrily chewing up the window shades and then the roof collapsed. As I watched the fire, I felt relieved that Charley wasn’t going to be living on our block anymore, but it also made me anxious and scared. I wanted to run home and hide, but I stayed because I knew my brother would call me a chicken shit if I left. This was the first time I felt a panic attack. I stepped closer to my father for comfort, but his eyes had a distant look as he nervously flicked the blade of his switchblade as he watched the fire. In the darkness of the night, I thought that he also looked like a hillbilly with his black hair slicked back and wearing a wife beater shirt. He just mumbled, “We don’t have to deal with their shit anymore.”
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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\u2019?” 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.<\/p>\n
“You better not come home for dinner because you’re daddy is really gonna give you a real whippin\u2019 for killing his turtles,\u201d she yelled after them.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 articles about the lack of government funding for the country\u2019s 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.
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“Everyone was riding trains back then,” he would tell me.<\/p>\n
He had started working as a staff writer for the magazine 52 years ago and eventually bought the magazine for himself. In the three years I worked for the magazine, I had yet to travel by train. When I accepted the job I thought I would be taking all kinds of train routes to cover various stories, but Sidney always told me there wasn’t any money in the budget for travel.<\/p>\n
“Maybe one of these days you can take the California Zephyr. I took that line at least 25 times,” he once told me.<\/p>\n
I wrote about the country’s rail system and all its problems from the cubicle of my office. I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t written one original article for the last few issues. I would go on the web and surf for railroad industry stories. At first I would find a story and rewrite it a bit so it didn’t seem like I was plagiarizing, but even that seemed like too much work. Then I decided just to do some very minor edits on stories that I ripped off, but that seemed like too much work as well. So for the last two issues I used articles from other publications and I didn’t change a damn word. In one issue I lifted an article, word for word, from an old Newsweek about the dangers of transporting hazardous materials by rail. I gave it to Sidney and he was happy. It was a pure cut and paste job and nothing more. In the last issue, I lifted an old article from the Wall Street Journal about cutbacks in federal spending for the rail system.<\/p>\n
Sidney loved my stories. In a couple of the stories I changed the name of some D.C. bureaucrat who worked in the Transportation Department to Charley Dart in homage to my childhood Hillbilly King. I also renamed the Amtrak public relations director to Marlene Knuckles in memory of Charley’s old squeeze. Sometimes when Sidney walked pass my cubicle, I’d be talking to a friend on the phone, but to impress Sidney that I was really working, I would start to shout out Charley Dart’s name. “I know Charley Dart is there! Please put him through to me at once!”
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I once told Sidney that I’m finding some dirt on Charley Dart. “Yes, Sidney, Charley Dart is not a squeaky clean bureaucrat, I got some info that he has a sordid past. Do you know that he once stole cars and even sold drugs and fireworks to kids?” It wasn\u2019t selling drugs or stealing cars that made Sidney angry, it was that someone would actually sell fireworks to kids. Sidney shook his head and wondered aloud what Washington was coming to in hiring such a bureaucrat. I told Sidney he should write an editorial to expose this evil Charley Dart. Sidney thought it was a wonderful idea. He said he hadn’t felt this energized in years about an editorial.<\/p>\n
All my crude plagiarizing had proved my point that no one read this rag. Sidney said the magazine had a modest readership of ten thousand, but I figured Sidney was cooking the circulation numbers to charge more for advertising. He may have printed 10,000 but he probably only mailed about 200 copies on a good month. I had no proof except that we never received one letter from our readers. But Sidney told me I had a bright future ahead of me with his magazine.<\/p>\n
I had already been home for two weeks when I called Sidney and told him I needed another week off. I told him my nerves weren’t getting better and I needed to stay home a little longer. Even though Sidney was concerned about my health, he was even more concerned that my feature story on the high fatality rate at railroad crossings was due in a few days. I told him not to worry that I had been working on it at home and I would email it to him in a couple of days. I had found an old story from the Chicago Tribune archives about this very subject \u2014 it was from a three-part series, a good 6,000 words.<\/p>\n
I knew I couldn’t go back to work until the panic attacks stopped. In the last couple of weeks I tried to go outside, but after a few minutes, my legs would become rubbery and I thought I was going to hyper-ventilate and faint. My only comfort was staying at home. My mother had called me during my second week at home and was concerned that I was becoming an agoraphobic. She suggested that I go to church. “A little prayer might just do the trick” she said.
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So I tried going to church. I sat in the back pew and I felt a panic attack coming on as the service started. My heart began to race as I stood up with the others when the priest made his entrance. My knees grew weaker, I couldn’t control my breathing and I thought I was going to faint. I didn’t want to faint in church, so after 10 minutes I had to leave. Once I was outside, the panic subsided and I felt like I was able to breathe again. The cold air felt good as it stung against my skin that was soaked with sweat. I wondered how I would ever get back to work and sit through meetings if I couldn’t even sit through a church service. Later that afternoon, I decided to go outside to get a burger. I had to go out since I had no food in the house. I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle going to a grocery store with all those aisles and bright lights, so I went to a takeout joint a block away. I had a death grip on the counter as I waited for my order. My head felt heavy, the lights in the takeout joint seemed much too bright. Why does everyone insist on using fluorescent lights? I thought I was going to go blind. If I wasn’t so hungry, I would have run out of there. How long does it take to make a burger anyway? I waited. I wanted to sit on one of the counter stools, but I had this phobia that if I sat down, my knees would lock and I wouldn’t be able to stand back up. After I got my order, I struggled to get home. My legs felt they were going to give out and I found it difficult to breathe.<\/p>\n
After I had ate my burger, I took a nap. I’m spoiled by afternoon naps since I haven’t gone to work. It was late in the evening and dark in my apartment when I woke up from my nap. I made my way into the kitchen to get a glass of water when I saw my neighbors\u2019 bathroom light on below. I grew excited as I saw some flesh through the window. She was naked as she stood there looking at herself in the mirror. As I watched her, I thought she had a new tattoo on her arm, but the more I looked, the more it didn\u2019t look like a tattoo. It looked too splotched and shapeless. It looked like a large bruise. She also had the same mark on her ass as well. With lipstick in her hand, she scrawled something on the mirror. I couldn’t make out the words. I was too high up to read the print. I wondered what she was writing.
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She started to cry as she wrote more words on the mirror. She dropped the lipstick into the sink basin and then threw herself to the floor and held her face in her hands as she continued to cry. It looked like one of her eyes was blackened as well or was it smeared mascara? Her boyfriend entered the bathroom and with a twisted expression on his face he shouted out some angry words. She didn’t look at him but continued to cry. He looked at the mirror to see what she had written and that seemed to make him angrier. He kicked her in the side and dragged her along the floor and out of the bathroom. I wondered if I should call the police. I feared that if I called the police then they may somehow find out that I’d been spying on them all this time. But I called the police anyway. As I waited for the police to come, I continued to look at the bathroom window in the darkness of my kitchen. A few minutes later a policeman stepped into the bathroom and looked around to do a quick inspection. He glanced at the writing on the mirror and shook his head and left. I never knew what happened that night. I never found out what she wrote on the mirror.<\/p>\n
By the middle of that week I sent Sidney my 6,000 word opus on the dangers of railroad crossings thanks to the Chicago Tribune. He called me a few hours later and said it was the best article that I had ever written, maybe the best article the magazine had ever published. During my third week at home, my anxiety decreased but maybe that was due to the fact that I decided to start drinking throughout the day and evening. I thought if I maintained a certain high, I would feel less anxious. It worked. I also showed my appreciation to Sidney for being so understanding about my mental health that I sent him a long, torturous article titled, “The Road Beds of the European Railway System.” It was about the different foundations used to lay rails and ties on a railroad. It was someone’s dreary thesis from some website that was a good 30,000 words.<\/p>\n
Sidney called and asked why was I sending him this extra story? I told him that I couldn\u2019t stop writing. I told him that I was on a roll.<\/p>\n
“Yes,” he muttered, “nothing can stop good talent. You got the fire in your belly!”
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He then changed the subject and told me in an excited manner that he had just finished his editorial about my fictional D.C. bureaucrat, Charley Dart. “I raked that bastard through the coals!” he said proudly. “After this issue is published, he’ll never work in Washington again!”<\/p>\n
“Good work Sidney!” I was actually proud of him.<\/p>\n
Sidney told me to keep up the good work and hoped to see me in the office that coming Monday. I told him that I looked forward to coming back. Yes, I thought, I could go back to work if I could just maintain an alcohol-induced high.<\/p>\n
Since that night when the police came to my neighbor’s apartment, the bathroom light didn’t go on too often, or at least I wasn’t looking for it anymore. I had lost much of my lust for that tooth-brushing beauty ever since I saw her being abused by her boyfriend. Violence often takes the heart out of romance.<\/p>\n
But I did see the light go on in the bathroom one last time. I was sitting in the dark in my kitchen late one night while sipping some tea before going to bed. I decided to look down my window and I saw their bathroom light on. She was doubled over as she vomited into the sink. She was in her underwear and I quickly noticed she had a few more bruises on her face and arms. Her whole body trembled as she heaved. I wondered if her boyfriend was poisoning her. She cupped some water with her hands from the running water and rinsed her mouth. Her boyfriend came into the bathroom and swung his arms with violent gestures. He looked furious. In a rough manner, he threw a towel that hit her in the face. After he stormed out of the room, she slowly dried her face with the towel and walked out, shutting the light behind her.<\/p>\n
I hated this man for abusing her. I hated her for staying with him. I thought the only thing that could save them was fire. A raging fire that wipes the past away. A blazing fire that forces one to make a new start. A new life. For them. For me.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Copyright Wawzenek 2013<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first time I saw her, she was brushing her teeth. She had just moved in with her boyfriend in the unit below me. It was a U-shaped apartment building in Albany Park and my kitchen window was on the wall that was adjacent to their bathroom window.<\/p>\n …<\/span><\/p>\n