"We're lost out here in the stars." Kurt Weill         It is summer, l977. Lake Michigan's winter waters that boom and crash across the rocks at Montrose Harbor now murmur, faintly, though the el train's click-clack, click-clack sighs are constant through the Babel of twenty-six languages saying, "Thank you," and "Fuck off." If you try to move that body lying in the street, you may have to fight it. Romance comes in as many flavors as Baskin-Robbin's ice cream. On the floor we spread out my friend Peter's photographs of Uptown people. We hold them up and look at each separately. These people pictured appear unsure whether life will end in glory or defeat. A hard question for a summer night. But they, like you and me, are gamblers. At the floor's first shaking, we are on our feet. The noise is terrifying and astounding. Through an open window we see the concrete porch and stairs of the building across the street collapsing, moving away from the face of the building, slowly. Each stair falls over a lower one, the porch dropping on top of the last stair. The portico above the door explodes as if it has decided at the last moment to join the rest of the concrete debris. The neighbors, dressed in disarray, hold their breaths like underwater swimmers. Now we breathe as the dust rises.         No one is injured. I think it the most startling humorous thing I've seen. If Zeus had issued a thunderbolt could he have designed anything more imaginatively powerful than this? Romance ignites my soul. [I ask myself, could this have happened on the northwest side of Chicago, a blue-collar area of bungalows and two-flats, where I live? All with neatly mowed grass.] In Uptown, there exists a wild churning of people and things. Next to a street's curb may lie cans, bottles, papers and sometimes a person. Rarely is there a patch of grass to cut.        I can remember, as a young child, going to Maxwell Street with my parents four or five times a year to buy shoes and other clothes of quality for a fraction of the price they were selling for in downtown department stores. Maxwell Street was a seedy area on the near southside. It was, at that time, an exciting and delightful place. There I saw jugglers, patent medicine men, snake charmers, gypsies, and vendors of hot dogs, balloons, trains, and dolls. Even a Chinese laundry. Uptown fascinated me as an adult the way Maxwell Street intrigued me as a child. It held the same excitement, the same mix of various groups of people haranguing each other. Maxwell Street was safe when I was a child, therefore I believed I was safe in Uptown.         My first experience with Uptown was as a student at Truman City College. When Mayfair City College, on the northwest side, closed the classes and teachers were transferred to Truman City College, in Uptown. Then, a couple of years later, while I read in a play by the Chicago playwright, Stacy Myatt, we practiced the reading of our lines at her Uptown apartment. After the practice readings, we'd party at the Green Mill Lounge. At these readings, I met my friend Peter.        Uptown's multiethnic area on the north side is bounded by Irving Park Road, Foster Avenue, Marine Drive, Ashland Avenue. The neighborhood has a glorious and interesting past when the Big Bands played the Aragon Ballroom. The music of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo, Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Harry James, Louis Armstrong played there in the 30's, 40's, 50's. The band members ate at the twenty-four hour restaurant on the corner of Lawrence and Broadway. Though the Aragon Ballroom has been closed for many years the Green Mill Lounge, across from the Lawrence Restaurant, hosts poetry-slams on Sunday nights and the renovated Uptown Theatre shows foreign films. In the 40's, Uptown's stylish six-flats were divided into small apartments to accommodate the skilled and unskilled laborers who arrived in the city from the south and other parts of the country to work in the factories as part of the Second World War effort.        Peter and I spend a lot of the summer of 1977 looking at his photographs. He begins by showing me photographs of his mother and father, their house in Opelika, Alabama, his grandmother and grandfather, pictures of himself as a baby being held by his grandfather, photos of him riding his pony, of his dog Fritz, and lastly pictures of him in Germany and Switzerland after the Second World War. Then he shows me a collection of photographs he had taken of Uptown people. Through the summer of l977 we look at these photos of Uptown's people Peter took, and though I do not know it at the time, after we marry in February l978 and buy several buildings in Uptown, I am to meet them all.         Peter is a Southerner, from the section of Alabama called the black-belt because of its rich, loamy, black soil. This section runs roughly across the middle of the state from east to west. The white southerners who arrived north during the war came from north Alabama and the hills of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and West Virginia. Many of them stayed in the north after the war while others returned to their homes and farms in the south.