PRAISE FOR BILL HILLMANN AND THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD
“A raucous but soulful account of growing up on the mean streets of Chicago, and the choices kids are forced to make
on a daily basis. This cool, incendiary rites of passage
novel is the real deal.”
—IRVINE WELSH, AUTHOR OF TRAINSPOTTING
“Hillmann’s prose is sharp, his dialogue is righteous and the F-word hits the reader square in the face like belt-fed .50 caliber ammunition. The Old Neighborhood is a wonderful first novel.”
—THOM JONES, AUTHOR OF THE PUGILIST AT REST
“Tough and real and filled with a remarkably interesting cast
of characters, this is a novel in the great Chicago tradition.
Nelson Algren would have loved it, as I do.”
—RICK KOGAN, CHICAGO TRIBUNE SENIOR WRITER & COLUMNIST, WGN RADIO HOST, AUTHOR, AND CHICAGO LEGEND
“Bill Hillmann’s The Old Neighborhood is like a right hook to the chin with brass knuckles, crackling with both bravery and urgency. Brilliantly evoking Nelson Algren’s Neon Wilderness and Richard Price’s The Wanderers, the novel is unflinchingly honest in its depictions of class and race, a deft portrait of
our sometimes-less-than-fair city.”
—JOE MENO, AUTHOR OF HAIRSTYLES OF THE DAMNED
“Bill Hillmann writes with a furious humanity
and wide open heart.”
—TONY FITZPATRICK, RENOWNED ARTIST AND AUTHOR
“Hillmann describes in detail the horrifying, hilarious and
moving events of a childhood dominated by a heroin-addled career criminal of a brother. The story is like something
from a Scorsese film.”
—THE SPECTATOR UK
“A dark, urban tale.”
—RESONANCE FM LONDON
“Bill Hillmann’s The Old Neighborhood is as good as it gets. The generosity, style and passion of his story gripped me from the beginning and convinced me as few other books have that here was a writer to be reckoned with. Chicago has a new
literary star in its firmament.”
—JOHN HEMINGWAY, AUTHOR OF STRANGE TRIBE AND GRANDSON OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
“Bill Hillmann, a veteran of the streets, the boxing ring and
the staging of knock down drag out literary happenings finally gets his say in novel form. We love its raw authenticity.
Bill Hill is the Rill Dill...”
—KENT AND KEITH ZIMMERMAN, AUTHORS OF HELL’S ANGELS, ROTTEN, AND OPERATION FAMILY SECRETS
“Bill Hillmann has written a top notch novel.”
—MARC KELLY SMITH, ORIGINATOR OF POETRY SLAM AND THE HOST OF THE UPTOWN POETRY SLAM
“Hillmann paints such vivid scenes of the north side, I feel as
if I am right there. I’ve always believed that this part of Chicago and these neighborhoods deserve more literary attention than they have ever gotten. Hillmann’s novel
delivers, showing the side of Chicago that those who grew
up and worked here would recognize. His language is powerful and his characters lively. The central murder scene is so well conceived it was like I was working it as a cop. Hillmann is
a writer worth keeping an eye on, writing about a city that
is just aching for the right storytellers.”
—MARTIN PREIB, AUTHOR OF THE INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED MEMOIR THE WAGON AND VETERAN CHICAGO COP IN ROGERS PARK
“Bill Hillmann takes you deep inside what it’s really like growing up on the streets in a tough Chi-town neighborhood. Excellent read.”
—FRANK CALABRESE JR., FORMER CHICAGO MOBSTER AND AUTHOR OF OPERATION FAMILY SECRETS
“The Old Neighborhood is a rib-wrenching look at man’s desperate desire to survive and rise above even the most harrowing of circumstances. His dialogue is crisp and true.
He captures the street and its ethic in a way anyone who has come out of such an environment can relate to. But the story itself is one that any reader, anywhere, will come to care about because it is as basic as life itself—live every moment to its
fullest because that moment could easily be your last.”
—JOE DISTLER, LEGENDARY BULL RUNNER IN PAMPLONA AND NYT PUBLISHED ESSAYIST
“It’s an exciting read, hard to put down. It brings back memories of the neighborhoods on the North Side, the speech patterns, it takes me back there. It’s a great book.”
—DAVID DIAZ, FORMER CHICAGO GOLDEN GLOVE CHAMPION, ’96 US OLYMPIAN AND WBC LIGHTWEIGHT WORLD CHAMPION
The Old Neighborhood
A Novel
Bill Hillmann
Curbside Splendor Chicago
PROLOGUE
THE MUSCLED-UP, NAVY-BLUE ’65 IMPALA sat elevated on ramp jacks above the white slab of the two-car garage. Pungent oil spilt in a steady bead to the tin pan below. You watched it empty as you crouched beside the car with your head craned downward. Your long arms stretched down—hands planted flat on the concrete. The veins bulged and crisscrossed the bulbous knots of your forearms like strings of lightning.
The garage door burst open, and a teen with a buzzed scalp panted in the doorway. He wore a brown jean jacket and construction boots. The gray winter sky illuminated his smooth cheek.
“It’s going down! It’s going down over at Senn right now! Dey’re runnin’ dem niggers out de neighborhood!” he yelled.
Moments later, you briskly walked east down Bryn Mawr Ave. toward the Red Line “L” stop. Large clots of salt-blackened snow lined the edges of the sidewalk; the freezing weather preserved them, shin-high and sloped, like tiny mountain ranges. The teen knew not to talk to you. He knew he’d get no response. He was afraid to even look at your hawkish scowl and the broken and re-broken nose. They sent him to deliver the message and show you where. That was all.
This silent, negative charge radiated from you. You ground your teeth and stomped on in Chicago’s burning January freeze—a freeze that can paint a man’s face and hands red in seconds. A rumble of shouts and honking car horns built to the north. When you got to Wayne Ave., you peered down the narrow corridor of the one-way street, which intersected with Ridge Ave. at a forty-five degree angle. An immense, calamitous procession ambled slowly down Ridge. You quickened your pace to a jog and cut down Wayne. As you approached Ridge, you saw a long line of leather coat-clad city police officers with their powder-blue chests peeking out near their collars. The cops’d taken one of the southwest-bound lanes and surrounded a parade of over a hundred black teenagers. Traffic skirted slowly around them. An awestruck young mother eked past in a brown four-door Buick. Her young boys’ faces were glued to the window in back.
At first, you could only see the black boys’ faces, which were stoic and resolved. Their feet slipped on the thin films of ice. They were twisted at the waist with their arms locked elbow-in-elbow to create an intertwined shield of bodies. A black kid with a fuzzy gray skull cap and a black quarter-length pea coat bugged his eyes out at the faction of white hoodlums across the street who stalked them from across the way. They were just a few feet up the sidewalk from you. The black boy muttered, “Mothafuckas,” quietly.
Then, you saw the girls inside the arm chain. One thick-boned, dark-skinned girl pressed her school books tightly to her chest. Her full lips pursed. Her eyes darted from her snow boots across Ridge to the gang of