What is it about this night? This last eve of the old year? Why do we celebrate its closing with such wild abandon and so much heightened loneliness?
Why do we need to be with each other when time crosses an invisible line?
Is it release for dreams that never came true?
Risks never taken? Love never found?
Is it a refusal to accept what is? Perhaps.
But is it also a celebration of what we possess above all other forms of life on Earth-the perpetual belief in hope? In our struggle to celebrate and to reflect at that magic hour of midnight, we do many things, both good and bad.
But this night-of all nights-is the one time that we get to feel truly alive.
A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
There was a still cold on the streets. The once-soft autumn mud had frozen into hard brown wrinkles in the empty lots. Blanched leaves were frozen flat to the sidewalks. In the alleys lids were iced tight to the garbage cans. Wooden porches creaked in the cold to the slightest booted step and an icy slick filled every crevice of the cracked and crumbling curbs. Even an outside doorknob could grab an innocent uncovered hand and, in seconds, thrill it into numbness.
Crisp . . . you could hear a church bell five miles away, it was so cold and clear. Stamp-your feet-on-the-pavement cold, it was. Rub-your-mittened-hands-together cold. Icicles-on-your-mustache cold. The first real hard cold to make a tight winter fist over the city.
Yes. Of course. It was New Year’s Eve in Chicago.
And two young policemen were in their squad car, prickled with anticipation, knowing that at midnight, all hell would probably break loose. But where? And from what direction?
It was just approaching the magic hour when suddenly a man ran up to their car as they cruised down a side street on the West Side.
“Officer, there’s a big fight right over there,” he said pointing, “and somebody’s shooting off a gun.”
“We drove to the mouth of the alley,” remembers one officer,” and there must have been 50 people all hitting and scratching each other; they were using pool cues on each other’s heads. It was a complete melee. We didn’t see a gun. All we saw was a crowd and we walked into the middle of it. They started hitting us, too, so we called for assistance, because they kept on punching and hitting each other. They’d just emptied out of the back door of a pool room.
“The cavalry showed up with their blue lights looking for us as well as the gun and there was a pile of people, I’d say men, all on top of each other on the alley floor and we peeled each one off and couldn’t find the gun. Then someone shouted, ‘She’s got it,’ and we turned and saw a short squat little woman, looked like a refrigerator with arms, running down the alley clutching her purse.
“So we chased her and got to her and said, ‘Lady, we want to see your purse,’ and she said, ‘You ain’t seeing nothing,’ and thus began the giant tug of war, with her fighting and screaming, and finally we calmed her down, got the purse and there was no gun. She was still spitting fire when we put her in the squad car.
“But she was going to jail for disorderly conduct like 22 others, and once we got over to the station and sat them down, we wanted to process her first since she was the only woman and we’d do the men later.
“Now what is your name and address?” the officer asked her.
“I got to tell you something important,” she said.
“Just name and address please,” the officer said.
“No, I got to tell you something.”
“This is going to be a police brutality beef. That’s what this is all about, I thought,” said the policeman.
“Please, just your name and address.”
“No”, said the woman. “I have something to say and I’m going to say it.,”
“Then say it.”
The woman leaned toward the policeman and spoke. As she did she slapped her thigh and her face broke into a big grin.
“You know what?” she said.
“No. What?” said the officer.
“This has been the best damn New Year’s Eve I ever had.”
THE `TUXEDO SYNDROME’
New Year’s Eve is a night unlike like any other. It is not that things are done this night that have not been done before. It is just all done at once. People kiss, have babies, get in fights, fall down, take their clothes off, get arrested, shoot off guns, run into viaducts, dance with their shoes off, pull up their skirts, blow horns, pass out, stay up all night, go to bed early, feel terribly lonely, fall in love.
Emergency room doctors, firemen, nurses, paramedics, policemen all see what we do that night. They’d probably be doing it, too, but they are working on that last night of the holiday season when the people go on their last big fling.
“You can call it the `tuxedo syndrome,’ ” said an emergency room doctor. “Everybody on New Year’s is wearing a tuxedo. When they are brought in, they don’t know who they are, where they are or where they have been . . . but they know they are wearing a tuxedo. It gets quiet from about 11:45 p.m. to about 12:20 a.m. Never had anyone shot just at midnight. I think everyone takes a moment to reflect.
“But then all hell breaks loose and in they come to the emergency room. Fights, car crashes, they’ve been shot or they fell down. And the first thing they say when they are wheeled in is, `Don’t cut the tuxedo,’ because we usually cut the clothes off injured patients.
“They don’t care if they have a hole in their chest, they just want to know if there is a hole in the tuxedo jacket. They will scream and yell when you put in an IV and say it hurts, but they won’t utter a word when you pull their pants off a twisted up bloody leg hanging by a string, because they want the pants in one piece. Now this is tried and true and happens every year. The tuxedo syndrome. I’ve had them say, before we start stitching them up, `Now count them . . . five studs and two cuff links, right? You got `em? Don’t lose them on me. And be careful of those shoes!’ And then they are out for the count. That’s New Year’s Eve in the emergency room.”
THE DEADLY LIMITS OF SHOTGUN FUN
A night on the West Side is often not easy. It’s cops and robbers every night. A good-guys, bad-guys chase. An “I saw you drop it”-but-“You didn’t catch me, did ya?” game.
The sellers on the corner versus the two guys in the squad car. It happens all the time-when it is raining, when there is sleet, when it is a soft night in June and when the night is so cold it pulls the warm breath from your lungs.
“It was New Year’s Eve, and we started at 9 p.m.,” remembers one tactical unit officer. “We knew we’d be on the street, making arrests and writing reports until 6 or 7 in the morning so we had what we called `A Taste of Fillmore’ and everyone brought in something from the district for a feast before we left the station. Coleslaw, fried chicken, ribs, hamburgers. It was fun!
“And then midnight came and the guns were going off everywhere, and we were trying to find out who was doing it and take the guns. A game, you know. It happens every year.
And then one of our guys came upon a man with a loaded shotgun who was firing away. The cop walked up to him and told him to stop, and drop the gun. He didn’t. He pointed it at the policeman.”
The man was told again to drop the gun and he did not listen. Then there were shots and the man fell to the ground. “When I got there, I found a man lying on the ground shot and a policeman sitting with his hands over his face, devastated,” remembers the police officer.
The man’s wife came out screaming saying that her husband was only drunk and this was supposed to be all in fun. You looked at that scene and you knew: On that New Year’s Eve, the fun stopped at 12:15.
THE SKIING DOCTOR, THE ORGANIST AND THE MOTHER-TO-BE
When Dr. Mayer Eisenstein thinks of the holidays, he thinks of babies. Babies he has delivered on Christmas Eve, on New Year’s Eve and in the week in between. For 25 Christmases and 25 New Year’s Eves, he has delivered babies at home. Dr. Eisenstein is a home- birth doctor. That’s his specialty. He remembers many of those babies but especially the ones born during that magic time-the holiday season.
“I remember one New Year’s Eve. It was snowing like crazy. I couldn’t get my car out-the snow was too thick and the woman only lived a few blocks away. So I got my medical bag out, put on my cross-country skis, and headed down Devon Avenue. I remember that night clearly. There was no traffic. Cars were left where they’d gotten stuck. There was a peaceful feeling, almost cozy feeling, to the street that night. People tucked inside their homes, going nowhere. And a baby about to be born. I remember I got there, delivered the baby and was so content about the night, I left my skis there and walked home as the sun was coming up.”
But the most truly exceptional holiday birth Dr. Eisenstein remembers was a Christmas baby. The woman, who had had two babies before-and they were fast deliveries-had gone into labor on Christmas Day. The doctor was called. He got to her home and her husband was gone-down a block away at church playing the organ for the Christmas service.
No, she did not want to deliver the baby without her husband at her side. So she waited until her husband came home. The husband returned, asked how she was doing, and announced he had to play for another service, but he would stay if she needed him. She smiled and said the Christmas music was more important. She would wait. She did and so did the doctor.
In late afternoon, the husband returned to his wife’s side. The woman relaxed and gently and quickly gave birth. Dr. Eisenstein was asked to stay on. Christmas dinner was served by a relative and then, with the glow of peace and completion permeating the house, the father sat down to a giant organ that filled half the room and played for the doctor, his wife and a new life.
WHAT GOES UP . . .
Newton’s law. What goes up must come down.” So says Lt. Wayne Wiberg, who has seen what comes down on New Year’s Eve and it comes down like a monsoon rain. Bullets. Thousand of them shot into the air at midnight.
“People just don’t seem to understand when they fire a gun off their back porch, out their window, in the gangway, from their roof, that the bullet is going to land somewhere,” he said. “If you have ever listened to the police radio on New Year’s Eve, it is total pandemonium. It starts crackling at about 10 minutes to midnight `Shots fired at . . .’ and it lasts until about 12:30.”
There are neighborhoods where buses, taxis and squad cars take refuge under the viaducts at midnight because of the zinging bullets. Wiberg remembers one recent New Year’s Eve. It was cold and clear, so clear you could tell the caliber of gun that was being fired. The tah-tah-tah of semi-automatic, the BLAM of shotguns.
“We’d just arrested four people, three men and a woman, for firing their guns off a balcony right in front of us and we got the guns and the people and lined them up in the lobby of their apartment building. I went outside to call for a wagon to take them to the station and as I walked to the squad car I heard it . . . that clear whistle of a bullet coming through that cold still air. I never heard the shot, but I heard the bullet coming toward me and then my pant leg shook . . . trembled, and I looked down and there was a hole shot right through it. Believe me, I went to church the next day. And I kept the pants. Never fixed them. I keep them as a reminder . . . of New Year’s and that old law of physics: What goes up always comes down.”
THE CAR WITHOUT A DRIVER
The two policemen were told to shut off traffic on Division Street at midnight. Too much gunfire from the Cabrini-Green projects and too many drunks spilling out of Rush Street. So they did. Pulled their squad car into the middle of Division just west of the Chicago River at Cherry Street, left the blue lights flashing and got out waving their flashlights in the dark.
“We shut the street down,” remembers the 1th district policeman.”It was just a little after midnight and we hear honking. We turn around and here is this car coming at us, honking away, but there’s no driver. We can’t see a single person in the car and it is heading for us. And going fast. Then all of a sudden it stops right in front of us.”
As the two officers ran up to the car, they heard cries from within-“Help me, I’m shot.” There was no glass in the side windows. They leaned inside and with their flashlights scanned the front seat with circles of light. They saw a man lying across the front seat, blanketed by shards of glass. Beneath him, on the car floor, lay a woman. She had been working the pedals with her hands. He’d been steering blindly, lying down.
“We pulled them out and saw they could stand up,” remembers the officer. “He kept saying, `I’ve been shot. My lady has been shot. Help us.’ So we looked for their wounds, looked for blood, looked for holes in their clothes. We dusted the glass out of their hair, off their faces, took their coats off and shook them and got all the glass crystals off them and announced, `You’re not shot.’
” `I’m not?’, he said. `No, you’re not. You’re fine’, we said. `Someone blew out your windows, but nothing hit you.’
” `Man, we aren’t going to die. Happy New Year, Officers,’ the guy said; then he grabbed his lady and hopped into his car. He drove off, windows all blown out, honking his horn and wishing us `Happy New Year.’
“We stood at the intersection and with our flashlights, waved back.”
AND THE BAND PLAYED ON . . .
New Year’s Eve. Midnight. Time to duck. Officer Vince Mancini was working the 14th district. He and his partner pulled their squad car up near a school. And waited. And then right in front of them, a man came out of a gangway, just as the two metal hands met and stood straight up on the clock, and he fired away.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
OK. Rock `n’ roll time. Mancini and his partner jumped from the car and ran toward the midnight cowboy with his pistol, telling him to surrender and lay down his arms. The man ducked into an open door. They followed, reaching for him as he was running. They entered a room of bright lights, women with crinolines and high heels, dancing with men to Mariachi music on the record player. Party hats, balloons and a cake, with rococo icing, on the kitchen table.
Mancini grabbed the gunslinger and they fell down on the linoleum. Grappling, rolling around, resisting, struggling. Nobody at the party seemed to notice. The man, who had consumed a few beers, finally gave up, turned over his gun, and succumbed. The ladies with crinolines kept dancing.
“Then we went to take him away and book him,” says Mancini. “He really wasn’t a bad guy. He said, `OK, amigo, I go now,’ and everyone stopped for a minute when we took him off. The whole party waved goodbye, and before we got out the door they started dancing again. He got busted . . . and the band played on.”
A GIFT WITH HIS NAME ON IT
I was a ward of the state. I was 14 and living at a mission for the homeless. I was singing with bums for my supper and I felt very, very alone,” says Johnny O’Donnell. “But I was going to high school at St. Ignatius and working jobs after school to pay for it and I told a friend where I was living. I’d been in 14 shelters and group homes, but this was the worst. I told my friend not to tell anyone.”
And his friend didn’t but Johnny thought he did, because the next day he was called in by his high school counselor, who began the chat with: “How are you doing?” And Johnny began to cry. He told him how he was living, thinking he knew all about it. The counselor didn’t. He had called him in to congratulate him for making second honors.
But the counselor immediately directed him to the Mercy Home for Boys. Johnny went, liked it, but couldn’t get in. There was no room available. It took seven months, with Johnny bouncing from shelter to shelter before, finally, they had a room for him.
“I remember my first Christmas there,” says O’Donnell, who is now a 12th district police officer. “All the boys gathered together and we sang carols. And then Father Close came to us and gave out presents. I got a present that was wrapped, with my name on it. In all the shelters and group homes and foster homes I had lived in, I’d never gotten a present that was wrapped and-MY NAME ON IT!
“I usually got a bag of socks or some underwear from a grab bag and it was never wrapped with a ribbon or really meant for me. But here was a manicure set with a $10 bill in it from Father Close with my name on it. The next year I got a wallet, with a $20 bill in it, all personally wrapped and a card with my name on it. It was for me.
“I never forgot that. And I made a New Year’s resolution that when I grew up and finished college and got a job, I would give presents to kids like me. Hand- wrapped with a card.”
And so for Christmas, O’Donnell and his wife buy 125 presents for the children at the Mercy home. They wrap them up on the kitchen table and add the cards-each with a child’s name on it. So during the holidays each child, he says, will have a smile on his face.
But the biggest smile by far, as each new year begins, is on his.
NEW YEAR’S EVE FROM THE PIANO STOOL
Something has changed over the years. I can see it in their eyes,” says Buddy Charles, Chicago’s renowned piano-bar artist, who holds nightly court at the Drake Hotel.
“You see it on New Year’s Eve, even. People seem programmed. Depleted. Spiritually worn down. They sit together in one room, but they are strangers.
My job is to play music and give them some romance, some pleasure and tempt them to dream. Some people are illiterate about dreams these days. They seem dead inside.
And on New Year’s Eve, when we can all start again, I wonder if they are dreaming at all. Or are they too scared to dream? Are they too dulled to dream? Have we become so passive we don’t say, `What if . . .?’ like you might do on New Year’s Eve?
” `What if the beautiful woman with the great legs at the end of the bar smiled at me?’ `What if I won the lottery?’ `What if the next year will be better?’ On New Year’s Eve I look out and wonder if they are dreaming. And are they asking, `What if . . . ? ` “
THE BOY WHO WILL FOREVER BE 13
I look for him still,” says Chicago firefighter and engineer Bob North. “I do. On the playgrounds in the neighborhood where my firehouse is at May Street and Roosevelt Road. He’d be about 16 now. I don’t know if I would recognize him, but I remember that little boy. He was 13 and it was Christmas Eve. And we got a call for an ambulance assist. We got there before the ambulance.”
Being the engineer, North was riding on the curb side when the firetruck drove up. It was not a fire. There was only the small form of a boy lying on the ground, his head, face down, limply hanging over the curb, into the gutter.
“I got to him and saw he’d been shot in the back of his head. We had to try and hold his head together until the paramedics came,” said North. “There were all these people standing around saying and doing nothing. They claimed they didn’t speak English. I asked for his mother or his father and everyone shrugged. I opened his jacket and he must have had 4 or 5 beepers on his belt. He was out selling dope on the corner on Christmas Eve and somebody shot him.
“That really enraged me. He was small . . . under 5 feet tall and he should have been in bed, dreaming of sugarplums and presents under the tree. I held him in my arms and thought of my own son, who was his age.
I thought, `This is crazy. This kid is still a baby, and on Christmas Eve he’s out alone doing this. And getting shot! Where’s his mom? Where’s his dad? Where’s the Christmas in this family?’
“We had really good paramedics who showed up. They took the boy off to the hospital and I heard they saved his life. Around New Year’s of that year I called one of them and asked how the boy was doing. He said the boy lived, but there was so much brain damage, he would always be 13 years old. For the rest of his life. And yeah, on New Year’s and around that holiday time now, I look for him. In the playgrounds, walking down the street. I look for the kid who I held in my arms once and who will always and forever be 13.”
