There used to be movie theaters there, vaudeville houses, dance halls, high-class apartment buildings. Now it was run-down tenements and vacant lots. We stood on the El platform and he saw the vacant lots, I saw the short cuts. Kids will always make the shortest distance between two points. And adults will follow. But sometimes the shortest distance between two points was not a straight line. It's down the back porch, skipping the falling-in steps, up the tree and over into old Manny's backyard, through the window of the garage – you pause, there, to take in its dank and oily stench, its glints of light on tools, its brooding grownup mysteries – then shooting out the door across the alley and scooching under the chainlink fence to wriggle through the child-sized-and-no-bigger space between Miz Nell's and the old dentist man's house – quiet so the dogs don't bring Miz Nell or her equally ancient daughter Charis running with a broom.