Trespasses

This is part 1. See part 2.

I campaigned for a new friend to go trespassing with on the sly. Dani’s classmate and friend Colleen was almost the youngest of several siblings. She and her little brother were legendary, to me, as tough, hard kids who could and would kick your ass if you provoked them. 

I met Colleen at Dani’s house, when I showed up to find them drawing at Dani’s dining room table. Hunched and curled lefthandedly over a sketch pad, Colleen turned only her head to gaze straight at me for a moment, unsmiling, as I sat down. She had blue eyes and delicate Irish features. Her blonde hair was cut short, just long enough to part in the middle and feather. Her hair and her worn corduroy jeans made her look capable and boyish: a girl after my own heart. As Dani sketched lightly in pencil on typing paper, Colleen drew cartoon dogs and cats with confidence in felt-tip marker. 

I thought I’d never seen anything as cool as the way she curled her whole left arm above and around her work. When she wrote, she drew her o’s and even her small a’s and e’s clockwise, forming the e from the bottom up. Could I learn to do that? I’d never watched anyone draw with such skill and fluency. I was so fascinated that I must have seemed about to fall face down into her drawing. 

Colleen remained almost silent until I left. She didn’t like me, or maybe she wanted Dani to herself, as did I. But I couldn’t get her out of my head. I decided I would draw until I was good at it, and I would train myself to be ambidextrous.

One way or another — probably on an occasion when Dani wasn’t home — Colleen came to my house after school. She tossed her windbreaker over a chair and we ate some Oreos.

“Want to see a secret hideout?” I asked. 

“Where?”

“In Arthur alley. There’s, like, a jungle.” 

Colleen lived in the opposite direction, so she hadn’t seen the jungle. I felt great about knowing something she didn’t.  

I had visited the jungle hideout occasionally ever since Cathy and I found it three years ago. The “jungle,” along the alley between Arthur and Schreiber Avenues, was a strip of long-neglected, overgrown land alongside a municipal streetcar barn. You could walk up the alley from Ravenswood, turn right, and disappear into foliage. A certain spot under the ailanthus and cottonwoods was clear of undergrowth, and a couple of fallen limbs made convenient places to sit. The back wall of the hideout was the dark brick wall of the car barn. With no streetcars left in Chicago, and the rails paved over, the massive flat-roofed barn stored mountains of road salt and dormant snowplows. 

One time, Cathy and I had found a stack of Penthouse in the hideout. We later described some of the pictures to her mom and to my mom. 

“In practically every picture, a woman had a man’s thing in her mouth!” I exclaimed.

“I think you and Cathy are using somebody else’s hideout,” my mom had said. “Don’t go in there any more. And don’t tell your dad what you saw.”

That was a long time ago, when I was nine. I had traipsed through that alley since then, but not looking for the hideout. I liked to look at the green tops of the trees, swaying slightly on a warm summer day, against the blackish brick warehouse and the blue sky. It was a peaceful sight. 

Prowling with Colleen on this gray day, I stepped off of the paved alley and into the foliage as if off the edge of a swimming pool. The jungle wasn’t as deep as I remembered, and we easily found the old hideout. A few beer cans rusted on the dirt, which was black with spring dampness under the trees and bushes. Boring.

I looked straight up into the new leaves. They weren’t as cheerful with the gray sky. I scrutinized the broken view of the sky for any hint of blue.

Colleen was already five steps up a ladder, individual iron rungs bolted into the brick wall of the car barn, every foot and a half all the way to the roof. 

“Get off there,” I said, not sure whether I meant it, or whether I wanted to follow her.

“No,” she said, climbing. I followed her. Big iron hoops at the top acted as handles to let us climb over the lip, and we were on the roof. It was so easy. We looked at each other and smiled. From behind the knee-high parapet wall, I looked down past the jungle and across the alley at the backyards of the houses, and at their garages and their rusty 55-gallon garbage barrels. The yards were quiet. I wondered what was happening in each house. My parents had almost bought a house on Arthur, but my mom didn’t like the street because it had no big trees. 

Looking toward the train tracks, running along Ravenswood perpendicular to the alley, I saw the headlight of a train coming from the north. And I could see the signal structures above the tracks. I liked this perspective.

Colleen was already clambering back down into the jungle, so I followed. We pushed through the bushes along the wall until we found a door. Shoving it hard, we were able to crack it open about six inches and squeeze in.

Light seeped in through a few filthy skylights and flowed in through the opening of the stuck door. I looked at the cloudy daylight where it lit the ground inside the warehouse: heavily cracked cement, gravel. I could smell dust and oil. Colleen waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark and then went exploring. Massive garbage trucks were parked end to end, blocky and shadowed, along this side. Beyond them, a vaguely yellow loading machine hunkered down by a mountain of road salt a story high.

It occurred to me that I wasn’t afraid of getting caught. If it happened, I assumed we wouldn’t get in trouble. I looked innocent, or thought I did, despite my grubby jeans and my shirttails hanging out from under my windbreaker. Colleen’s face was always either wary or wore the smirk of a tough boy. My easily intimidated face would save us. 

I stepped forward in the dark between the two nearest trucks, toward the salt mountain, and looked left and right for Colleen, straining to see. Far away at the end of the building, light streamed in and shrunk my pupils as a door opened. Its squeak echoed. Was Colleen sneaking out?

Men were talking, far away. 

“Is somebody in here?” 

“You see something?”

I took a step back as Colleen came tearing at me at top speed out of the shadows. 

“Get out get out out out,” she said, as if running from an axe murderer. She shoved past me and out through the door we’d entered by. Curious, I leaned out past the truck to look in the direction she’d come from. I saw a man with a flashlight walking calmly towards me. 

“You kids stay out of here,” he said. I darted out, and we ran through the jungle to the alley. Several seconds later, I heard the door slam as he pushed it shut from the inside.

I went back on the roof one more time, on another day, with Gayle and Dani when even Dani was bored enough to sneak off. The roof was a lot more interesting than the inside.

***

I loved to be outside. I stared out the window in school. I memorized the gardens and trees on my way home. I walked along Ravenswood and gazed up at the tall grass on the railroad embankment, because it made me feel I was out in the country. But there’s no remembering the autonomy and adventurousness of twelve and thirteen without remembering sexual aggression from men and boys. 

My experiences of harassment — I was lucky — were not, relatively speaking, violent. The first one came from the young men who worked at the candy factory on Clark Street. Sitting out on the sidewalk during their breaks, they made moaning and kissing noises at my friends and me as we walked to the library on summer days. We were nine or ten and tried to ignore them. My friend’s mom told us to walk on the other side of the street — but then we had to cross the busy street without a stoplight.

More Clark Street errands, more casual misogyny. At least this particular attack only happened once. As Dani and I crossed Farwell in front of a car, the teen driver took his foot off the brake and bumped Dani, knocking her into me. Startled, she turned and yelled, “Hey!” 

“He-ey!” The boy mimicked her, and his friends laughed. We kept walking and didn’t talk about it.

In seventh grade, Robyn and I experienced some stealthy groping at the indoor Century Mall, a 35-minute bus ride down Clark Street. It was the first time Robyn’s mom let us go shopping without her. Three boys about our age followed us around the spiraling ramps through the crowded mall, catcalling us. One of them grabbed my ass. Each time we emerged from a shop, I spied them leaning on the railing nearby, waiting. 

Their following us made me afraid of them, but I said nothing. Neither Robyn nor I knew the boys had touched both of us. 

Without acknowledging what had happened, we eventually lost our nerve and left, walking fast to the bus stop. The boys followed us through the crowd and across the busy intersection of Clark and Diversey. As we found seats, we saw the boys  jumping up and down outside the bus, grinning and waving. I blushed, mortified, thinking they had been following me for some specific reason. As the bus roared up Clark Street, Robyn blurted, “They pinched my bottom,” and then I told her, mine too. 

Then there was the night Gayle and I were walking home along Clark Street after sneaking out to see a movie. A short young man in a flannel shirt reached out and, not slowing down, rubbed my chest as he met and passed me. I kept walking as if nothing had happened. I didn’t know whether Gayle had seen what he did.

I knew, like all kids, not to talk to strangers and never to approach someone who spoke to me from a car. I knew I was to be home when the streetlights came on because I was safer that way. And I knew boys were only after one thing. But somehow I didn’t know how vulnerable I really was — that minor invasions could have been major. I was lucky, and I had an incorrect belief about luck: I believed I was lucky because the really bad thing that was going to happen to me had already happened. I put these experiences behind me. I don’t remember ever thinking twice about walking to school or to Robyn’s house or wherever I wanted to go. 

My most infuriating, ongoing harasser was a lot closer to home. …