Never a City So Real (11 page)

Firefighters and police often get takeout here. While I'm eating with Boyle, a hook-and-ladder truck pulls up from Berwyn, a neighboring town, and one of the firemen runs in to pick up lunches for his colleagues back at the firehouse. “I don't think they're supposed to bring their trucks over here,” Quercia whispers. Boyle's cell phone rings. It's his wife, Nadine. She still worries that if she hasn't heard from him it means he's been arrested by the police. “I'm all right,” Boyle assures. “Love ya.” A retired Cicero police officer enters the store, and while he and Boyle don't exchange greetings, they don't holler at each other either—which, all things considered, is progress. A few weeks back, they had gotten into it at the town hall. “You're nothing but a goddamn lawyer,” the retired officer had yelled at Boyle. “At least you didn't call me a fuckin' Cicero cop,” Boyle had yelled back.

Boyle recounts this exchange as the retired officer exits. They acknowledge each other with barely perceptible nods. “You know,” Boyle tells me. “I can't even remember what we were arguing about.”

GT's Diner

The world intersects at the corner of Lawrence and Kedzie Avenues, on the city's northwest side.

The names of the commercial establishments read like an intercontinental guidebook. Within a three-block stretch, there is Raul's Tire Shop and a Supermercado, there is Holy Land Baker and Jerusalem Food and Liquor, there is Jas Hind Grocery, New Seoul Optical, Thai Little Home Café, and Patricia Cowboy's Fashion. More than half the people in this neighborhood, which is known as Albany Park, were born in a foreign country. This is America's gateway, the port of entry for newcomers to this country. For small merchandisers, the biggest-selling item is phone calling cards. One establishment sells
only
calling cards. The local Volta Elementary School offers bilingual classes in Spanish, Gujarati, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Bosnian. Six clocks in the hallway are set to the times in Sarajevo, Lima, Jerusalem, New Delhi, Hanoi, and Chicago. Albany Park, one resident told me, “is the neighborhood for everybody else who doesn't have a neighborhood.”

For half a century, this community of wood-framed homes, brick bungalows, and three- and four-story tenements was home to mostly Russian and Eastern European Jews. Then in the 1960s, Koreans moved in, and they became such a political force that Lawrence Avenue was given the honorary designation of Seoul Drive. Then immigrants from unraveling nations poured in, refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador, families fleeing the fragile Mexican economy, and then Laotians, Thais, Cambodians, and Filipinos fleeing the political instability of their homelands, and finally refugees from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. By this time, many of Albany Park's original settlers had moved on. Temple Beth Israel first was converted into a Korean Presbyterian church and is now a Romanian Pentecostal church. Congregation Mount Sinai became, not without irony, the Beirut Restaurant. From Albany Park, it has been suggested, you can watch the world change.

The neighborhood has the feel of a small village, in part because the El runs at street level, like a trolley, making the community quite accessible. But it's also because virtually everyone here shares a common journey: They have come to Chicago, to America, for a better life. And so an amalgam of ethnic and religious groups mingles in a manner unlike the city's other more insular neighborhoods. At Thai Little Home Café, for instance, the owner, Oscar Esche, who is seventy-seven and has been in this country and this neighborhood since 1972, doesn't serve pork since many of his customers are Middle Eastern and Muslim. The Cambodian Association on Lawrence Avenue is building a small memorial to the victims of the Khmer Rouge, and they are doing so with the financial and moral support of the Jewish community. Jewish leaders—some of whom grew up in Albany Park—have spoken with members of the Cambodian Association about how one moves on after the decimation of one's people. And at the Albany Park Theater Group, teenagers from places as diverse as Poland and Cambodia come together twice a year to perform a play based on stories of those in the community.

Albany Park is also a place where America is celebrated, often in a rather self-conscious manner. Each Thanksgiving, Esche sets up a full turkey dinner in his backyard, as an offering to Abraham Lincoln. “In our culture,” Esche tells me, “you were brought up to pay respect to the king, so here we pay respect to Lincoln. He's like one of our kings in Thailand who freed the slaves, King Rama V.” (In his restaurant, he displays a bust of Lincoln and a poster-size photo of this turn-of-the-century monarch.) Also, each spring Esche and his family—his wife, his wife's sister, and his three children—drive four hours to Springfield to visit Lincoln's tomb, where they kneel and offer thanks for what they have.

Down the street from Esche's restaurant is Mataam Al-Mataam, which is Arabic for “Restaurant–Restaurant.” Open twenty-four hours, it's owned by Kamel Botres, who emigrated from Iraq in 1979. Botres, who is Catholic, had worked as a clerk for a private oil company in his homeland. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and then again when Saddam Hussein was captured, local television reporters descended on Mataam Al-Mataam, seeking reactions to what had just occurred halfway around the globe. In the case of Saddam's capture, many of the customers—they come from throughout the Middle East and North Africa (though the young waitresses are from Venezuela, Romania, and Pakistan)—told reporters that they didn't believe it was actually him. And even those, like Botres, who didn't have any doubts that the United States had the right man were subdued. “People felt a little sorry. It was their president. You'd feel that way if it was your president,” Botres said. “There was nothing to celebrate.” He smiles as he tells me this. “I am an American in my heart,” he told me. “I can think how I want.”

 

I mention all this by way of introduction, to Ramazan Celikoski, the owner of GT's, a diner located half a mile west of Mataam Al-Mataam and the Thai Little Home Café, just down the street from the Bohemian National Cemetery, where Mayor Cermak is buried. GT's is a rather compact place—eight stools at the counter and five booths along the wall—and is situated at the end of a small strip mall, which also houses a Laundromat, a liquor store, and a pizza parlor. In the diner's plate-glass windows hang five signs, all in different fonts and colors, one of them handwritten, each at a different angle.
BREAKFAST
one advertises.
3 EGGS, HASH BROWNS AND TOAST. $2.75
.

Celikoski (pronounced
Chelikoski
) was twenty years old in 1982 when he left Albania for the United States. His father, who had had a sheep farm in Albania and had fled after his own father, an anti-Communist, had mysteriously disappeared, had preceded Ramazan by twelve years and was working as a cook in a downtown restaurant when Celikoski arrived. For a year, the two shared a room in a hotel, and then Ramazan found an apartment in Albany Park. Like his father, he worked in a series of eating establishments, as a busboy at a fancy downtown restaurant and as a cook at the popular coffee shop Lou Mitchell's. It was at his first job that coworkers began calling him John, which is what he goes by today. In the summer of 2003, he purchased GT's (truthfully, all he had to do was pick up the two-thousand-dollar-a-month lease) from a hot-tempered man, who also happened to be Albanian; while the previous owner had been losing money, Celikoski thought with his more easygoing nature he could turn it around. Though he did break even in his fourth month, he has yet to make a profit, in part because here, in this out-of-the-way strip mall, Celikoski has, grousing along the way, unintentionally transformed GT's into the equivalent of a domestic nongovernmental organization—an NGO.

Celikoski, who's forty-two and of medium build, has deep-set eyes, dark, thick eyebrows, and a hawklike nose, all of which might conspire to give him a look of intensity were it not for his ever-present crooked grin, which seems to say, “What are you going to do?” The first time we met, it was midafternoon, and the diner was empty except for two Mexican-American men in a nearby booth. “They're no good,” he muttered, nodding toward the two patrons. “Some of them drink too much. Some of them are here from six in the morning until twelve and not even buy coffee. At lunchtime, I tell them they got to go.” As he complained about the day laborers, he was, as always, smiling.

Shortly after Celikoski purchased GT's, a group of two hundred or so day laborers were evicted from the spot where they had been congregating each morning at a nearby bus turnaround. There they had constructed a makeshift plywood hut to give them shelter from the rain. They soon found their way over to GT's, where, because of the mall's parking lot, there was room for employers to drive in and pick up workers for the day. Moreover, the day laborers needed a place to take shelter from the elements as well as a bathroom. GT's offered both. On any given morning in the winter, fifty to sixty men, most of them Hispanic—though a few Mongolians and Cambodians as well—gather in the parking lot, just outside GT's, waiting for potential employers to drive up, usually in their SUVs, which the laborers swarm to like moths to a lightbulb. Since it's January, work is hard to come by, which is why these two men were still lingering at the diner at midday. One of them who looked to be in his twenties approached Celikoski and asked for a cigarette. Celikoski gave him one of his Marlboros. “Wake up your friend, please,” Celikoski told the young man, who was wearing a GAP baseball cap. The other man, who looked to be in his forties, his hair disheveled, his down jacket ripped, had rested his head on the table. “I wake him up three times,” the younger man said. Celikoski calmly walked over to the dozing laborer and gently shook him. “Amigo, wake up. Please, you go home and sleep. Respect me.” The man lifted his head, revealing a fresh wound on his forehead. He looked disoriented, as if he'd been drinking. Celikoski walked away, shaking his head. A few days earlier, he told me, feeling sorry for this man, Celikoski had given him a container of chicken noodle soup which he took out on the sidewalk to eat. The man consumed half of it before passing out, falling headfirst into the soup.

Celikoski grumbles incessantly about the day laborers. He says that on occasion they'll leave without paying for their coffee. Do you go after them? I ask. “For seventy-nine cents I say ‘forget about it,' ” he tells me. He says he's lost customers, especially women and children, who are intimidated by the loitering men. He says they'll gamble on the sidewalk outside, that they'll occasionally get into fights. And he contends they can't find work because they're too greedy. “They ask for too much money,” he says. “They ask for one hundred fifty dollars for eight hours. It's no good.” But the thing about it is if you spend time at GT's with Celikoski, listening to him try out his newly learned Spanish and offering the recently purchased hot pepper mix, one gets the distinct impression that he rather enjoys their company.

I arrive one morning, shortly after seven a.m. It's thirteen degrees out, and so GT's is packed with the day laborers seeking refuge from the cold. One man, who tells me his name is George and that he arrived from Guatemala fifteen years ago, is sitting at the counter, eating a breakfast of three scrambled eggs, potatoes, toast, and coffee. He's one of the few who actually buys a meal, this one for $3.39, usually when he's just finished a job and is flush with cash. He spent the past two days cleaning an abandoned factory for nine dollars an hour; it was his first hire in twelve days. (Many of the day laborers tell me that they do indeed ask for a lot of money but that it's because they need room to negotiate; otherwise, they say, they run the risk of getting paid near or even below minimum wage.) George is thirty-six and has soft features and an open face. He's wearing a black skullcap that he's shaped into the form of a Robin Hood hat. He taught elementary school in Guatemala, and in his first few years in the United States he worked in a poultry plant in South Carolina before it closed. “He's my friend,” he says, nodding at Celikoski, who's flipping a pair of frying eggs. “Juan,” he says of Celikoski, “he's kind of a quiet guy. He's trying with his Spanish. Sometimes I make my order in Spanish.” He smiles mischievously. “I'll speak to him in Spanish. See if he understands.”

“Te gustan los tacos?”
George asks.

“Mucho,”
Celikoski replies.

“Que tipo de tacos?”

“Pollo y carne.”

“Bueno,”
George tells Celikoski.

Another customer, Manuel Rodas, also from Guatemala, is at the other end of the counter. He's listening in on the conversation. He tells me that not long ago, he'd arrived one morning after a few days of steady work, and ordered breakfast. He then realized he'd left his wallet at home. Celikoski told him not to worry. He could pay the next day, which he did. Celikoski interrupts. He thanks Rodas for recently fixing the store's toilet handle, which had broken from so much usage. “He tried to pay me but I said no,” Rodas tells me. “So he gave me a free meal.”

A white man in a leather jacket walks into GT's, seeking workers. He sits down at a booth and is quickly surrounded by ten men. He's looking for someone with a truck, and so the men call out to George, who owns a small battered pickup. George is gone before I can get his last name.

I return a week later, on the Martin Luther King holiday. Celikoski had told me that a group of community organizers planned to hold a press conference at the diner to draw attention to the day laborers' frustration at not having a permanent site. “You agreed to let them hold the press conference at your diner?” I had asked, somewhat incredulous given his previous rant. He shrugged. “It's a slow day for business anyway,” he said. When I arrive, the place is packed, maybe thirty people, most of them simply milling around. As people order cups of coffee or hot chocolate, it becomes clear that Celikoski has no intention of taking their money. When he sees there are some children at the rally, he asks one parent how many of them there are. The father looks perplexed. He counts on his fingers. “Eight,” he says.

“I make eight egg sandwiches for them,” Celikoski insists. “On the house.”

At one point, I comment to Celikoski's lone employee, a newly arrived young Albanian, that he's going to give away the restaurant. The young man, as if to mimic his employer, shrugs. “He's the boss,” he says. Celikoski later tells me that he doesn't expect to turn a profit until the warm months when the business picks up and the day laborers find construction work and so are gone by early morning.

The next day, Celikoski is grumbling again. “Let me tell you something,” he says. “If America has a job for everybody, and these fifty, sixty people don't, maybe they are lazy, maybe they don't want to work. When I come to this country I find a job right away.” He then shows me a letter he'd received earlier that day from “concerned residents” (there were no names attached) asking shop owners in the mall to post
NO TRESPASSING
signs, and to file complaints with the police about the day laborers loitering in the strip mall's parking lot. “Will you?” I ask Celikoski. He shakes his head. “I feel sorry,” he tells me. “Some of them are good.” He says that as a child in Albania he learned from his parents something called
besa-bes,
which, he tells me, means if someone comes to your home, you help them. “Winter,” he says, “it's tough for everybody.”