theft and sexual assault. The campus police had to walk a fine line between the see-nothing attitude of the administration and the outrage of the campus community when it was suddenly revealed that such and such a crime had been treated too lightly. Some administrators were trying to bridge the gap, but they were still too few.
As I turned the corner, I spotted the new guy who was selling StreetWise, the newspapers sold by the homeless or nearly homeless to work themselves out of poverty. Speaking of crime, his predecessor had just been murdered in an alley not far from campus. Jimmy Maddox, disabled veteran, recovering addict and full-time comedian, had been well-liked in Hyde Park. People were upset and angry over his death and what seemed to be the lack of police progress in the case.
By now I was approaching Jimmy’s old corner. I’d passed the guy who’d taken his place two weeks ago quite a few times on my way to and from work. I’d bought papers, but it occurred to me to stop and talk. I wanted to see if there’d been any developments in the Maddox investigation that weren’t in the Chicago papers. Since Jimmy had been one of their own, StreetWise had better updates. The paper came out twice a month and there’d be a new one today.
I’d read the new vendor’s bio in the last paper. He was 28, but seemed much younger. He was also so fair he was almost an albino. He had long, lanky hair pulled back from a thin, mousy face. His skinny limbs seemed tight, like he was wired. I had wondered, as I walked back and forth to campus, whether he was scared of his new job or if he was on something. Unlike Jimmy, this guy rarely spoke. But his mouse face was appealing, a kind of Disney mouse face.
I knew I had bills in my tiny evening bag and I approached him. The bio had included his name, Dwayne Moorehouse.
He was looking away from me down the block toward the campus. I spoke softly, sensing I might startle him.
“Dwayne, how’s it going tonight?”
His small head snapped around and he hunched his chin into his shirt, like the little turtle that, in a moment of insanity, I’d let the kids buy in a pet shop. The tiny thing had only lived a month and had rarely stuck its brown head out of the shell, much to the kids’ disappointment.
After a pause, his pale eyes glanced up at me.
“StreetWise?” he asked in almost a whisper.
“Hi, Dwayne. Yes. I’d like a paper. I read your bio in the last issue. Dwayne Moorehouse, right?”
A longer pause, then the turtle head popped out briefly for a nod, settled back in his shirt. A barely audible “yes” followed after another delay.
Gradually his shoulders relaxed a little but he was looking down. He seemed fascinated with my shoes. I decided rushing would spook him, so I just stood there. I slowly put out my hand.
“My name’s Kristin, glad to meet you.”
My hand remained solitary in the air until I pulled it back to my side. Dwayne continued staring at my shoes.
I held out the money where he could see it and he took it quickly, pulling a paper off the pile he held with a practiced motion.
I tried again.
“I’m so sorry about Jimmy.”
The narrow corners of Dwayne’s mouth had been tending up, like a smile might even appear, but when I mentioned Jimmy, the corners sagged down into a sad little droop. He looked so much like a Disney mouse I imagined I saw whiskers drooping too. Then he looked directly at me with his pale, almost unlashed eyes and nodded. For a moment, there was a flash of quick intelligence, I thought. Though was I imagining that?
I moved on, a little unsettled by meeting Dwayne. I’d gotten used to bantering with Jimmy, and except for that brief eye contact, Dwayne seemed like he might have developmental problems, or perhaps he just had a speech impediment and was consequently shy about speaking.
Well. I shook myself. Whatever problems he might have, selling papers was better than making brooms in some protected workshop, inside all day. Despite being so shy, he was out in the public, meeting people, doing a hard job. Behind me I heard “StreetWise” again.
The ordinariness of courage. It’s easy to miss it.
3
The rat likes the cheese
Not the trap
But rats gotta eat
Don’t they?
“Traps”
Abigail Collins, #584
StreetWise
Wednesday, May 17, 7 p.m.
I was late to the reception, of course. That’s what Kelly had intended. But what she didn’t know, and I had no intention of ever telling her, was that it didn’t really matter all that much. Her Dad would probably have an emergency and be later still, if he made it at all.
You have to have a pretty thick skin to date a surgeon. I’d discovered that nine times out of ten you were left at the restaurant, reception, dinner party, opera (pick one), either dateless or abandoned after he got an emergency call.
Oddly enough, it didn’t seem to bother me, a fact Tom found astounding. I’ve always liked surprises—it was the unpredictability I actually liked. Will he? Won’t he? And the times we did get together became all the sweeter for it. Augustine of Hippo, a really randy Christian saint, wondered why, when he was a kid, pears he’d stolen out of an orchard tasted the sweetest. Why is stolen pleasure sweeter? Augustine couldn’t figure it out (well, actually he thought it had a lot to do with human sin, but I couldn’t buy that convenient out). I did respect his insights into the perversity of the human soul though. A lot.
The Anderson building was directly in front of me now. Ames Anderson was a wealthy racetrack owner and he’d bankrolled this hospital construction project with a single, fifty million dollar donation. Atonement? Tax write-off? Probably both. Though, can one genuinely atone while also reducing your tax bill? Kind of ruined the sacrificial aspect of atonement, I mused.
Tom had told me this pile of steel and concrete was going to double the number of beds at the hospital. His voice had carried both awe and worry. The clear trajectory in medicine these days is to reduce both health care costs and delivery, and thus increase profits. Eventually, I thought, health care could completely disappear for all but the rich. So why expand the in-patient capacity when reducing costs and increasing profits meant sending people who’d had surgery home before they passed go? Who knew? Privately I thought the honchos who ran this university hospital thought so much of their august brand (“First in Medicine!”) that they figured they could buck these obvious trends. Well good luck with that. The titanic plates that were moving under American society these days were crushing all kinds of human care, and health care was sitting right on a major fault line and the cracks were getting wider.
As I turned the corner on University Avenue, a concrete truck was just pulling out from the ramp that divided the block-long building into two sides on the ground level. Above, an arch on the second level connected the two halves. It seemed to me that these construction guys were cutting it a little close, since not a hundred feet further down the block, long black limos were discharging formally attired attendees under a rented marquee. Even though the month was May, the covered walkway was a smart idea. In Chicago, it could have been snowing.
