Elegy For Tom Vitaich

In the morning the white truck is in front of the building

The neighborhood filled with broken car windows

The sun rising over the red paint on the sideboards

You are dressed and ready to go by six o’clock

And you recline in the back with the buckets and the barrows as the open wind rolls over you and Chicago’s flat, hard streets

Michael and Mary’s dad will canvas for the work you will do in the city’s western shores

Nailing in wooden support beams for ailing houses on Jefferson

Cleaning gutters and laying roofs over the dusty attics of Chicago

Crooked nights I sneak from my home to bang on your window standing in the yard beneath the clothes line

Mirrors full of PCP

Our crooked reflection

We drive down to Sesame Street in the convertible and we make our deals while my home sleeps and your home sleeps

Mary pulls the bag from Logan’s Square fingers and pushes the hair from her face while sitting beneath her velvet Elvis

Forty dollars worth of powder left to go atop her mothers dresser drawers

She’s got your kid on the way

You’ve got a ring for her finger

Well, at some point before they found you in a hotel room dead two days with a needle buried deep in your arm we had already parted our ways

That was the summer I stole an airconditioner for you from the boys home and you and Mary moved out of her parents place and got your own apartment

And her father would give you an extra twenty dollars a day then because nothing was too good for his little girl

This is how you make a living

You get up in the morning and you lay a roof

You collect bags full of sand and cement and you cut your fingers on the shovel and the sand gets inside you but the paper bags never rip

And you use Sacrete when you’re in a hurry

And you tuckpoint the rotting houses and the ones that aren’t rotting for bored housewives and senile senior citizens

You place chicken ladders

At night Michael steals the car and parks it perpendicular to the curb sliding into a fire hydrant on his way to get a half pint from the Quick Stop

This is how you make your living

At some point you and Mary split up and the boy goes to live with her parents and there are no more construction jobs

No more eighty dollars a day under the table

No more hawks and slicks and barrows and hoes

So you sit in the cabin of moving vans

Hefting pool tables with granite bottoms and baby grand pianos

You work hard until you are thirty-five which is when you die

And you spend the extras on all night binges

You sniff whatever’s under your nose

And whoever said hard work wasn’t a virtue?

I remember you as someone who liked to have a good time

And someone who did time

I remember the court house on Dempster but truth be told I was there for Albert and it didn’t do either of you any good

It seems things should have worked out better for you

But when you grow up in the Mercy Homes

And you’ve got nothing to look forward to but your next conviction

Oh hell, man

I had just seen you two months before for the first time in eight years

With your cheap leather jacket stretched tight against your enormous shoulders but your smile that was still like a boy in grammar school having just snuck a peak under the teachers skirt and turned to the other boys to say Yes, it’s all true

I keep looking for the words to spell out your goodness but the dictionary is eclipsed by the two black rolls of tar pressed between your forearms and your biceps threatening to topple you from the ladder that was set against the roof and was supposed to keep you safe