*Some names have been changed. Any similarity to actual people is entirely intentional.
It is
easy enough to look back and pinpoint the beginning of things. Beginnings
are marked by a sudden change – a sudden burst of brightness, perhaps.
Beginnings are definitive. Endings are of a very different nature.
Endings are vague and difficult to place on a calendar or clock. Endings
are a cumulative mess of goodbyes and second starts and failed attempts that
seem to exist indefinitely until something else begins again. At least,
that is how Chicago was for me.
Chicago
began for me when I was seventeen and it was August. I drove down from
Wisconsin, on two lane highways and county roads, to the north side of Chicago
where I had a room with a view of Lake Michigan, a poster of John Lennon and a
mixed CD from my best friend. I had always known that I did not belong in
Wisconsin, and I had had a sense that I belonged in a place like New York or
London. But being seventeen and having never been to New York and having
visited London but having no idea of how to accomplish moving to a foreign country,
I went to Chicago. Later, in London and then in New York I would say that
Chicago was where I really belonged.
My first
job in Chicago was on West Lawrence Avenue. I had been living in the city
for less than a month when I started taking the red line and then a bus and
then a long walk up the west side of Lawrence Avenue to the small building that
at one point had a bullet hole in the window of the door. I would
leave for work directly after my anthropology class in which I was learning
about globalization and local culture. I worked with elementary school
students whose parents had come to the U.S. as refugees from the Khmer
Rouge. We would practice spelling and punctuation and basic math and they
would tell me about their older siblings who had joined gangs and about their
cousins who were making good money waiting tables downtown. And then
later in the evening I would watch them practice traditional Cambodian
dances. At this point I would feel quite lucky, for it seemed to me that
I was witnessing a fragile beauty that bloomed there in the late evenings in
the basement of that building on West Lawrence Avenue, below the floor that was
dedicated to Social Services and the floor that housed a small but striking
memorial to the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
Some
nights, when their parents were late to pick them up, we would wait on the
upper floor of the building, a room that housed a make-shift museum of
artifacts and remnants of the dead’s daily life that had been smuggled out of
Cambodia. The children would pick up and play with old toys from the
displays and would take pictures of the carved statues with their camera phones
until the door with the bullet-broken window would open and night and snow
would blow in along with the sound of their parents calling their names.
A year
later I met Caroline in my first college fiction writing class. She had
an apologetic grace that I admired and I must of have had something she admired
as well for one night in early September she invited me to meet her in Grant
Park to listen to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. When I arrived she had
a bottle of red wine in her purse. Sarah was still new to Chicago.
I had been living there for a year and, because I had recently moved into my
own apartment, I felt almost native so from Grant Park I led her north up
Michigan Avenue. I liked the downtown best at night and I loved it that
particular night because I could see the beauty of the lights through her eyes
-- bright and new and full of promises that neither of us could have
articulated but that we had both probably dreamed up as children. As we
walked she would stop to stare in store windows, admiring a dress or a pair of
shoes, telling me about this designer and that one and what I heard was a way I
almost wanted to be. I led her all the way to North Avenue Beach where we
sat together on the shore. She opened the bottle of wine and poured me
some into my empty Starbucks cup. She was older than me, old enough to
buy wine and to know how to make a vodka tonic. That Starbucks cup was my
first glass of wine, but in many ways I was old enough. The wine tasted
heavy and dark. I didn't like the taste but I liked the idea
and I liked her so though I drank it slowly and accepted a refill when she
offered. We watched the Chicago skyline rise up above the Drake hotel and
our friendship began.
At
another job I met Milton. Milton was my age. He was from the south side of
Chicago. From the very first time we rode the red line together, he liked
me. I had yelled, “What?!”for a reason that I cannot now recall and he
had smiled with a big, toothy grin. And all that day Milton had watched
me until finally I had said, “What?!” again and he told me that I was
“hard.” Stuart told me that “hard” meant that I was tough and he told me
he couldn’t figure out what had made me that way. I liked him because no
one had ever called me “hard” before – or even “tough” – and because we had
both been born into lives that had forced us to be the kind of tough that went
far beyond thick skin, that went into our voices and our quick but careful
smiles and our entire way of being. Milton was kind and smarter than most
people I had met in school. On Saturday afternoons we would take long
breaks and he would tell me about his girlfriend and show me pictures of his
daughter. He liked teaching me about the world he came from and about the
cut and clarity of the diamonds he wore to prove it and even about the gun he
carried in case someone decided to remind him of it.
And if I
didn’t know it already, after knowing Milton, I always knew that I could handle
anything because I knew that he thought I could and that was good enough for me.
The same
summer I met Milton, I also met Alex. Alex was a newly graduated English
major from San Francisco who rolled his own cigarettes and called me erudite
because he thought I was, even though I didn’t know what it meant. Alex
liked used bookstores and grilled cheese sandwiches and dipping his French
fries in mayonnaise and even though I had a boyfriend I liked him quite a
lot. Alex suggested that Annie Hall might be my favorite movie, even
though I had never watched it. And, later, when I was in Canterbury I
watched it and found out he was right. Alex wanted to know what books I had
read and what I had thought of them and even if the sparks were only in my
imagination I saw some when I quoted my favorite lines from my favorite books
to him and, later, when I no longer had a boyfriend I did have a better I idea
of what I wanted to have.
Before I
left Chicago for Canterbury, Caroline and my friends from work had a small
going-away party for me at her apartment on the fifty sixth floor of a building
that rose high over downtown Chicago, just above the canals. Below us the city sprawled like a
Technicolor diorama. And
while traffic that looked like toys moved in slow flashes of orange light far
below us, we talked and drank and as the night wore on the wine flowed red and
then white and then bubbling gold. And I had watched Alex as he stood leaning against the balcony railing
fifty six floors above concrete. He took a long drag of his hand rolled
cigarette, letting the smoke fill him. Moonlight or streetlight or chance
fell upon the orange embers at the tip of his cigarette as a light breeze sent
one flying towards me. It disappeared into the night air just before it
touched my face. I watched his body bend casually over the railing as he
tapped his cigarette against it, setting free more glowing embers, all falling
fast and orange down fifty six floors of black night. And later that
night he told me that those sparks would disappear in the air before they ever
got close to touching the ground.
Months
later when I was living in Canterbury, watching Annie Hall, I would think of
this moment and write about sparks. And much later I found that I could
see Chicago in every hot orange ember of a late night cigarette that I watched
men in tight jeans smoking in any city in the world.
By the
time I met David in September of my last year in Chicago I was in love with
Chicago. David was a rock’n’roller, a stoner, a writer, a good friend and
a bad idea. Like Chicago, David was tough to love but impossible not to.
He had
Chicago in his smile. He had it in his voice, in the deep ale and cigarette
songs he sang in a dimly lit bar or in the unfurnished living room of his
apartment. Maybe that’s why I loved kissing him – because I loved Chicago
so much that I wanted to get as close to it as possible. When we first
met, David had looked at me like he wanted to see me naked and I had met his
gaze. Nine months later I let him undress me until I was naked on
top of him in his bed. Those days I wore Chicago the way a veteran of war
wears a purple heart – only I was still dressed up in Chicago even when I
wasn’t wearing anything at all. And so David became entwined with my love
of Chicago until they were one and the same and later, when I was living in New
York, I would listen to his music and every part of me would ache with the pain
of missing something that was too big and too much of an idea and too little of
any kind of truth to have ever been mine at all.
Of all
the times I left Chicago, the most iconic image in my mind is one from the
night before I left for France. The lights of the Loop beamed like stars
in the distance and the rattling sounds of the “L” mingled with the far-off
whiz of traffic on Lake Shore Drive and the last verses of the Stones song that
was drifting through the open door of the bar at my back. It was a warm
February night and I was standing on the corner of Wabash and Balbo, watching
the black hair, black leather, black combat boots figure of my friend Mad walk
away up Wabash. She wore Chicago the way I wore Chicago, the way a
veteran of war wears a purple heart, the way all of us who came to Chicago from
somewhere else and made it ours wear the city. Even in the moment I knew that was Chicago to me: tough and
beautiful and something I admired. Though the city might always be trying to be
one thing or another – a tourist attraction or a stereotype – at heart and in
spite of itself, or perhaps because of itself, Chicago was a rock’n’roll
princess, a mafia darling, and the realest damn thing I had ever experienced.
For a
while after I left Chicago, I found myself missing Mad, because to me they are
one and the same. I see her face in my head on lonely nights in New York,
where I live now. I smell the winter windy city air and cigarette smoke
lingering together on her leather jacket. I feel the cold that has settled onto
her hair as it brushes against the bare skin of my neck when she hugs me hello
and goodbye. I see her throw back her head of long black hair as she
takes a shot of whiskey. After spending time with her, I started drinking
whiskey too because I liked the way it sounded when she ordered shots of
Jameson and so I started ordering shots of Jameson because it made me like the
way I sounded too. And now, in New York, I am always surprised when I
meet a man and he doesn’t like the way I sound when I order a shot of Jameson
because everything she said was so sure and strong and I loved her for it and I
would like to be loved for it too. But, then again, it was her who told
me that I too was sure and strong. With a glass of whiskey in her hand,
she had told me that it was in the way I entered in a room – in my black boots
and long black jacket. She said I was someone that people felt they
should know. And I had felt so lucky to know her.
When I
returned from Cannes, I did not return to Chicago. Instead I spent the summer
with my family in Wisconsin before moving to New York in August, but within a
week of my return my brother and I were in his car driving down county roads
and two lanes highways, to Chicago’s north side, to David’s apartment where his
band was playing and a party was raging and where I believed that something
happy and hopeful could begin for my brother as it had begun for me. Mad was
there too and she taught my brother to drink whiskey just as she had taught me
and after some consideration I decided this was a good thing because of all the
people in the world who could give him his first shot of whiskey there was no
one tougher or better than Mad.
David’s
band played covers of the songs I had listened to when I had been much younger
and had not yet been to Canterbury or Cannes or New York or even Chicago, songs
that had made me feel that I belonged somewhere, songs that I had lived inside
until I was able to make my way out into the world in search of my very own
place within it. And now that I felt that I had found my place, I was
trying to give my brother the beginning of one too. So my brother drank
the whiskey Mad had poured into a paper cup for him. And Mad smoked
cigarettes out on the back porch. And David pulled me into the corner of
the kitchen and kissed me as if I had never left Chicago and as if we had all
the time in the world before I would ever leave again.
It is
easy enough to look back and pinpoint the beginning of things. Beginnings
are marked by a sudden change – a sudden burst of brightness, perhaps.
New York began for me when I met Zach. It was a hot night in late August
and it was my fourth night in the city. I was walking down Second Avenue
with Audrey, a friend I had met while living in Cannes. Audrey had picked
up smoking during our time in Cannes and as we walked down Second Avenue she
asked strangers if they had any cigarettes. That’s how we met Zach.
He was standing with his friends outside a bar, smoking. He gave Audrey a
cigarette and soon we were all in a taxi speeding uptown to Spanish Harlem
where Zach and his friends had an apartment with a rooftop deck and some beer
and a view of a city that neither I, nor Audrey, had seen much of yet.
On that
rooftop in Spanish Harlem I found myself standing before Zach and his friends,
holding my beer bottle in one hand, while the orange lights of the roof and the
city blended together and blurred my memories with my new reality. I was
reciting Woody Allen’s opening monologue from my favorite movie, Annie Hall. And when I had finished quoting
Woody Allen paraphrasing Groucho Marx saying, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any
club that would have someone like me as a member,” Zach smiled, stepped a
little closer to me and said, “That was good but here’s how it really goes.”
And so it
goes that New York began for me when I was not quite twenty two and it was not
yet September and I was too stubborn to believe I could be happy anywhere other
than Chicago. The night after I met Zach, my brother drove down from
Wisconsin, on two lane highways and county roads, to the north side of Chicago,
to David’s apartment where his band was playing and a party was raging and
there was something to begin to be happy about.
