Barry Gifford

(An excerpt from Barry's new book DO THE BLIND DREAM? published by Seven Stories Press, New York, April 2004.)

     The most beautiful girl I ever saw was Princessa Paris, when she was seventeen and a half years old. I was almost seventeen when I met her. An older guy I knew from the neighborhood, Gus Argo, introduced me to Princessa—actually, she introduced herself, but Gus got me there—because he had a crush on her older sister, Turquoise, who was twenty-two. This was February of 1963, in Chicago. The street and sidewalks were coated with ice, a crust of hard, two day-old snow covered the lawns. Princessa attended a different high school than I did, but I had heard of the Paris sisters; their beauty was legendary on the Northwest side of the city.

     Argo picked me up while I was walking home from the Red Hot Ranch, a diner I worked at four days a week, three afternoons after school and Saturdays. It was about eight o'clock when Gus spotted me hiking on Western Avenue. He was twenty-one and had worked at Allied Radio on Western for three years, ever since he'd graduated from high school. Argo had been a pretty good left-handed pitcher, I'd played ball with and against him a few times; he was a tough kid, and he had once backed me up in a fight. A gray and black Dodge Lancer pulled over to the curb and honked. I saw that the driver was Gus Argo, and I got in.

     "Hey, Buddy, where you headed?"

     "Thanks, Gus, it's freezing. To my house, I guess. I just got off work."

     "Yeah, me, too, but I got to make a delivery first, drop off a hi-fi. Want to ride over with me? Won't take long."

     "Sure."