HAMMOND, INDIANA By Richard Alishio “The completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history o f the human spirit. ” Mircea Eliade The Sacred & The Profane Dear Hammond, So many changes have occurred since Tve lived in the Northwest tha t I no longer remember the exact moment o f realization; perhaps i t happened while I watched tha t old wino stumble, fa l l , and smack hisface on ourparking lotplayground (wedged in among the taverns and the strip joints), then crawl o f f after leaking a p in t o f blood beneath the basketball hoop; or maybe i t was while reading saloon wa ll ads through steamy school bus windows: Bob’s Liquors—Shot ‘n a Beer 25$; or maybe it came from knowing orphaned boys at the Carmelite Home and listening to their fu r y . . . it doesn’t matter how or when: now I know you are a profane beast, recently discovered, squatting toadlike on the old swamps the Calumet Indians once called onion smell: Chicago. I’ve often wondered what you were before your marshes and your bogs were drained, before your sand dunes got done in, before the steel mills were built and your rivers ran their way without the sounds of piston heads drowning out their songs. Who were your people then? Did you love them more than the tribes who drove them off? And I wonder even more who I’d have been had not the milling of your flesh been factoried across my h e a r t . . . . There is so much of you that evokes in me a sadness, a sweetly perverted melancholy that whispers to me seductively, urging me to peel back my skin to let your sulphurous winds whip the raw meat until it is blistered like your land, fetid like your standardly oiled air. . .the victim taunting the tormentor. Nonetheless Hammond, I can remember times when I was ignorant of steel mills and innocent of desolation, times as a young boy within a world of curiosity and oddity. . . . I remember especially the small, overgrown field next to the corner store, a tangle of bramble bush and milkweed plants, of tall grasses and cattails beneath a lonely oak or elm; an eyesore to adults but a dense jungle to a boy only four feet tall. My brother Kip and I knew every inch and insect in the field, each bush good for cover, and we had secretly dug several tunnels and covered them with mats of woven twigs and leaves inspired by huts we’d seen in National Geographic. \Ne spent an eternity playing tag or capture-the-flag with neighborhood kids, crawling here and darting there, furtiveness and stealth the key to survival, knowing that exposure meant capture and then certain torture and death. When it was our big brother and his big buddy chasing us for swiping their model 12 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1987 Illustration by
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