The dust and clamor of the collapsing porch having settled, I hold up a photograph. Peter looks at it and says, "Everybody's sweetheart, Rosie." In the picture she's wearing a print dress and draped over her arm is a large vinyl purse. She stands in front of a flowering lilac bush, in a pair of summer sandals. She appears about to say something but has changed her mind. Rose is a five feet-two inch, one hundred-sixty pound, rotund woman. The following summer we buy the building at 4737 Kenmore, a block and a half from the Aragon. The tenants are remnants of the south that have stayed on as the buildings deteriorated from their days of grandeur. On the second floor, second-hand Rose plies an old trade. A trade they've discovered advertised in the ruins of an ancient site on the Sea of Marmara. Pretty in pink, Rose appears mornings in pink curlers, pink housecoat, pink nightgown. She has three admirers in the building: Clyde, Harold and John. Six tenants, each with his own bedroom, share the second floor bathroom. Rose can be seen mornings in the doorway of one of her admirers. On days other than John's, he can be heard voicing his need to retrieve his electric fan from Rose. Afternoons they gather in Tommy's air-conditioned room to wile away the time. One afternoon I hear them arguing. Tommy says, "What do you want to do that for Rose? You went to Texas last year and came back in a month."
        "But, I love him, Tommy."
       "Hell, you're crazy to go, Rose."
        "He's the love of my life. He wrote me to come. Said we'd get married."
        "Do you believe that?"
       "Kiss my ass if I ain't leaving for Texas, Tommy," Rose says as she moons him. No one believes Rose is going until a week later when the taxi's horn sounds out front and Rose takes her suitcases down the stairs with Harold, John and my help. She enters the cab and waves to us as it rounds the corner.
        Harold and John say, "She'll be back." But, I never see her again. Perhaps Rose's gamble paid off and she married the love of her life and lived somewhat happily ever after. All of us would have wished that for her.

       When the State of Illinois closed the state mental hospitals in the l970's Uptown's streets were roamed by the released patients, men and women, many of whom were incapable of providing for themselves. Daily, on the corner of Kenmore and Lawrence, I saw in a vacant lot a demented woman feeding and addressing pigeons. Outside the Sheridan Arms, I once saw an elderly man listen attentively as an addict damned the drug dealer who sold him crack and the whore who procured the money for it.

        The summer of l977 wears on. On a July evening, from the pile of photographs on the floor, Peter hands me a picture of George standing next to a bicycle. In the picture George wears the Western Union cap that he wore nightly when he delivered telegrams to Uptown residents. It's an old picture taken when George was thirty something. At fifty-five, George's hair is gray and he has a long untidy beard. On a small salary he supported his mother, step-father and uncle until they died. Though George no longer delivers telegrams nightly, he leaves his room at eleven p.m. to search the alleys and to sift through dumpsters for something he might be able to use. Sometimes, among the rank fish, crimson wine bottles, maggot crawling meat, purple satin prom shoes, moist lipsticked cigarette butts, he discovers lovers bedded down for the night. As the street lights go out at six a.m. and the cars begin to move through Uptown, George, with bulging shopping bags, wends his way back home past the policeman and the whore on the corner, past the Sheridan Arms and the pigeons in the vacant lot. To his chest he gathers a stuffed, four-foot, rouge-red rabbit.


        Uptown on the north side and West Madison Street on the west side are the nuclei for Chicago's alcoholics. In Uptown, The Center for Street People is James Harper's mission. James is a short, thin, unassuming black man with close cropped hair. In the picture Peter hands me James wears a long sleeve open-necked shirt and blue jeans He preaches occasionally at the Wellington Avenue Congregational Church, in the Lakeview Community, and is completing a Bachelor of Divinity degree at Northwestern University's Garrett Theological Seminary. When I meet James, it is early August l977. He ministers to alcoholics and other men who need a home. These are the homeless who have no place to go, nothing to eat, no place to sleep, no place to bathe. The Center provides them a place to live and a family of other men. James is a man of few words; a taciturn man; a man deeply respected by his friends and the men he serves.
        As we turn the pile of photographs over we find one of James at the Center. Then several pictures of homeless men. Peter identifies them. "See," he says, "here is Leon looking dapper outside the Center. That's William, with his red knit hat, and Reno smiling into the camera. This is Stirling in his black coat, striding down the street." Peter is quiet as he looks at the next picture. He says, "That's Jimmy Doyle lying drunk next to the building. Not a pretty picture." We shuffle the remainder of the pile. Create new piles we'll look at next time.