June 06, 2017

PC 473: The Wizard of 63rd Street

* Author : Shane Halbach

* Narrator : Dominick Rabrun

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

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Rated PG-13.

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The Wizard of 63rd Street

by Shane Halbach

2016

Russell walked past the Check-’n-Go and the cell phone shops on either side of it. It was cold, and the bare branches of the leafless trees reached up to snatch plastic bags from the sky.

He paused at a bit of graffiti low down on the brick of the abandoned corner building. Someone had written, “CA$H MONEY”. Most folks tuned that stuff out, and even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t see any significance in this particular tag. But Russell did; he recognized it for what it was. It was a pretty good one too: even folks who knew what to look for might have missed this one.

He felt a vague stirring inside, but he ignored it like he always did. Tamped it down. He didn’t do that kind of thing anymore.

Then again, erasing wasn’t drawing, not exactly.

He snatched up a rock and scraped a quick slash through the “C”. That ought to do it. He’d have to keep an eye out to see if this was foolishness or someone new in the area.

Not that he cared one way or the other.

If it had been summer he could have come first thing and got the news from pretty much anywhere, but this time of year you couldn’t reliably find folks out until ten or eleven. Folks mostly stayed inside if they could help it.

When he got to the corner of 63rd and Oak Grove, he saw the usual players: Wax, Nipsy, and the rest of the old timers, standing in front of Jesse’s mini-mart, Angelo over by the steps up to the train, trying to sell cigarettes, and a group of kids over by the Seafood Shack. Some Russell didn’t recognize, but he picked out at least three Slate Street Warriors.

63rd and Oak Grove was neutral territory. Technically, the S Street Warriors controlled west of Oak Grove and the Sons of Profit controlled everything east, but both sides used the Green Line from here. Certainly it was one of the few places where the stars-and-dots of the Sons of Profit mixed with the angel dogs of the S Street Warriors.

In fact, as Russell approached Jesse’s, the old timers parted and he saw a new angel dog painted on the front of the mini-mart. It was a fine specimen; at a glance the lines looked sloppy, but Russell knew there was power in the simplicity.

The drawing looked like a hasty sketch, but they were all more-or-less identical. Even the lowest member of the Warriors could reproduce it exactly.

The sagging lines of the face gave the dog a lazy but angry look, like maybe that dog was sleepy, and you’d best to let it lie. The halo was tilted just enough to suggest maybe that halo didn’t belong to that dog at all. Maybe that dog had stole it from someone more deserving and put it up there on his head just to taunt them. The effect was somehow menacing, even though you couldn’t point to anything explicitly wicked about it.

A sign like that probably wouldn’t mean much to someone who wasn’t from the neighborhood, but to someone like Russell, who’d lived here back when this was a neighborhood people had wanted to move to, who had roots in this neighborhood all the way back to emancipation, signs like this one formed a sort of map. They traced lines of power, repelling rival gangs and showing safe zones. They cropped up overnight like mushrooms,

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