“A pool,” she would say as we lay there in the dark. “For the back of the mansion, we have to have a pool. And a dug-in one too, like they have in The Beverly Hillbillies.” And when Delia would say this I would imagine her eyes lighting up like they always did when she thought of such amazing things. At times, there in the dark, I turned to see if the walls on her side of the bed had actually lit up with the glow.

Our apartment on May Street was a reflection of the street itself — small and cramped. It was for this reason that Delia and I slept in the same bed, and shared a room with my parents, and why my uncle slept in our pantry. I suppose if we had all sat down and thought about it, someone would’ve come to the conclusion that “Gee, this apartment is too small,” but the thought never entered our minds — or maybe it did. Maybe it was always there, lingering, when I would fall asleep on my uncle’s mattress in his pantry/bedroom and he would kick me out because there wasn’t enough room for the both of us, when we had to turn our mattresses up so that my parents’ party guests wouldn’t spill beer on them or singe them with cigarettes, when my cousin Chuey would come over, drunk, kicked out of his own apartment up the block, and fall asleep facedown on our kitchen floor. Delia and I would eat cold cereal and watch Saturday-morning cartoons as he slept at our feet, snoring, moaning, gyrating his pelvis as if having nasty dreams. There were no problems then. For us it was all routine.

And maybe our entire block felt the same. Maybe the entire neighborhood, with its towering church steeples, its neon signs, its liquor stores all crammed together like they were missing space to breathe, maybe everyone who lived there felt that way. So much so that the crampedness, the density, was just another thing you “understood,” like the humidity during the summer, like the fact that Joe or any of the other drunks or dope addicts might need the cops called on them, like the feeling that we needed to get into pump battles with the people on the next block. The fact that I could hear Little Joey’s parents, in the apartment building next door, arguing about how Joey’s father slept with other women, never entered my mind. The fact that my parents screamed about what was happening to all our money, then turned around and made discreet love on the other side of our bedroom, wasn’t a bother. I noticed, but mostly I didn’t. Mostly at night, when all the families in the neighborhood would get to arguing and sex, I would lie with Delia and talk about fortunes, about pools and about great schemes that would affect each member of my family forever. All these things, these feelings of crampedness, these feelings of being locked down in close quarters, simply were. They were undeniable facts that fell so far back in the mind one could sit on the front stoop and drink a cold beer, or, in the case of the younger kids on the block, squat on the curb and pan for gold.

Back then, it seems, there was something more romantic about living in a ghetto, in poverty, with too many members of your family; or maybe I was simply too young to have made an honest distinction between what was real — the gunshots, the suspicious fires, the deaths — and what was fake, or imaginary — the precious jewels, the gold Delia and I used to strike in the gutters. I’ve tried explaining out loud to myself that any person, any child, with imagination enough, need enough, to turn chips of broken glass into diamonds, bottle tops into gold, certainly has enough imagination to reverse the entire situation of his youth, turn it all into a fairyland of lowriders, loud radios, sexy women with long dark hair, short-shorts, and deep red lips. But the fact remains that May Street was a place where I saw drunken men brawling to the death, I saw wives get beat by their husbands, I saw children get hit by cars and then watched those cars get chased down by neighbors and the drivers get beat into bloody pulps.

Early one summer morning Delia and I were awakened by my parents and told to get out of the building. I remember distinctly the smell of smoke, the sound of sirens and the distorted chatter of police radios. I remember also, distinctly, being convinced that someone had set our apartment building on fire, thinking to myself, What did we do? and running through a list of possible reasons why someone might have wanted to burn our place down—Has my father been cheating on my mother? Did Joe mess up a drug deal? As I ran down the stairs, led by my uncle, followed by Delia and my parents, I remember thinking also that something must be saved, that a dog or cat must be rescued. And though I am sure I got this idea from some TV commercial for fire alarms, or some newscast of a suburban rescue of a cat or dog, some middle-class situation far removed from the reality of May Street, I still felt there was something I needed to save.

When we got to the front of the building and turned to look in the direction of the flames, we saw that it wasn’t our building that was on fire, but the building behind. And with faces of relief, and glassy eyes, each family from May Street’s row of apartment buildings stood looking at the flames shooting up.

Betty our landlady was already out there, hard at work, sweeping the cascading soot into the gutter, the soot that kept falling over the places she had just swept. And Joe was out there as well, undoubtedly thinking up some way to snag one of the pump keys the firemen were using. I remember when word was passed that it had been Lil’ China who had set the blaze. That he had done so in a jealous attempt to get back at his ex-wife for seeing another man. I remember also the gasps that sounded from everyone but Betty, who was too busy sweeping her sidewalk, when it was further discovered that Cookie, China’s ex-wife, and their three kids had not been able to escape the fire. It was in this instance especially, this milling around of all the neighbors, the good-looking women revealed in their curlers and eyebrowless faces, the kids in their Loony Tunes pajamas, the fathers, like mine, in their shorts, shirtless, bare, that I remember hearing all the phrases that made up my youth, and surely Delia’s too. “Who was it?” “Did they catch him?” “Did she die?” “Damn, the kids too?” All these phrases delivered with honest concern, with heartfelt sincerity. In the eyes of all those neighbors, looking up, you could see the flames, and you could also see that just like Delia and I thought about fortunes while we panned for gold, our neighbors were thinking about Cookie, her kids, and even China, who was now, it was reported, in custody. They could see flames rushing through their own apartments, engulfing their own families, and they could see perfectly how the cops had beat China once he was caught, “because any father who kills his kids would definitely get his ass beat by the cops.” And somehow, though China’s deed was inherently wrong, it was obvious that everyone there could fathom it completely. In light of China, the death of Cookie, in light of all those other deaths — Smokey who had been gunned down across the street one September night, or any of those others on the receiving ends of bullets or suspicious fires, or even those who had succumbed to natural deaths, to old age or heart attacks — in light of all this, the families could band together, the neighbors could all come together and say “Damn, the kids too?” and shake their heads with some common understanding, some relief in the thought that they had dodged yet another bullet, then say good night to each other in common courtesy, and retreat back to their apartments, like nothing could be done, like life was simply an arrangement, the cards had been dealt and you had to play.

Eventually, after the fire was quelled, and the firemen had given the all clear, my family climbed back up our stairs. By that time the sun was coming up, and my father asked us if we all wanted to go out onto the back porch, which faced east, toward a Lake Michigan masked by skyscrapers, toward a sunrise that would bring the usual heat wave, and toward the charred buildings that had been affected by the blaze. We stood out there, Delia, my parents, my uncle, and I, looking at the burnt remains, inhaling the deep smell of seared wood, basking in whatever coolness the early morning offered. We looked at the wet streets, the buildings dripping with black, sooty water, and I suppose we were searching for something. As the sun came up, and the morning mist began to burn off, I looked down the long rows of porches that stretched off into infinity on either side of us, and saw each family, arms entwined, looking toward the sunrise and doing the same.