Chicago Wanderings

I was…

… running. Hurricane Charley had dropped trees onto my normal route to the airport, so I  had arrived with 30 minutes until takeoff, too late to even do a self check-in. The line at the American Airlines counter was queued four rows deep, so I selfishly grabbed a roaming attendant and told her how little time I had. She escorted me to the front of the line, and I was able to do the same again at the security checkpoint. A few minutes later, I had my bag back and was stuffing my wallet and cell phone into my pockets.

The next step was to board the monorail to my terminal. Still clutching my boots, I ran across the tile in my socks, sliding onto the monorail and grabbing a pole for balance as the doors closed behind me. I put my boots on while trying to stay standing in the moving monorail, ungainly hopping while trying to tug them on. Curious onlookers curiously looked on.

The monorail doors reopening was like a footrace gunshot. I was off, dashing across the colossal terminal, past vendors and bookstores and gourmet restaurants, past scowling people unimpressed with my Mercury impression. I arrived with eight minutes until take off, just in time to wait in line…

…stepping off the train, much relieved.  I had spent the evening in the Chicago suburbs, ignoring the fighting of my host, Brandy, and her boyfriend, Mike. I called Laura, who also lived in the Chicago suburbs, to see if she wanted to hang out, but she had just finished a major fight with her boyfriend and her medical cure for depression had left her incapable of driving. This is why I hate suburbs, hate sprawl. A thousand miles from my car, I was effectively stranded, at the whim of anyone else who owned a gas-guzzler. Twenty miles from me was one of the world’s most exciting cities, built the way any place with over a hundred people should be built: everything within walking distance or only a metro ride away.

The next day, sick of the drama, sick of the lack of mobility, I wished best-wishes to Brandy and hopped on a train into Chicago, relishing in my freedom, the liberating dynamism of a city. In the suburbs, there was nothing entertaining that was not a franchise. In the city, though, anything could be found. As I’d already seen all the major sites in Chicago on previous visits, I had no plans for what I’d do once I’d arrived in the city. Rather, I wanted to see what I could find by simply wandering around…





…eating a hot dog and drinking a Pepsi by the Centennial fountain, that big one you see in the opening credits of Married With Children…

…watching fighter planes roar overhead, part of the annual Chicago Air Show…


…sitting at a free open air jazz concert put on by a local group called Gallery 37. All the players were of high school age and fantastically talented. I particularly enjoyed the pianist, a boy of about fifteen or sixteen with unkempt black hair, thick glasses and a mouth that permanently hung open. He looked like someone who never notice the “kick me” sign other kids had stuck on his back. He didn’t seem very excited about being there either. If you plugged your ears and just looked at him, you would think that he was at mother-mandated piano lesson, playing scales over and over. But unplug your ears, and boy could that boy play. Goddamn! His fingers flew, pounding those keys as if he were Gershwin reincarnated. He was the idiot-savant of hipness…

…dancing at a free night rave in Grant Park, getting caught up in the energy of the crowd. The crowd was cheering as the records were changed, hollering and clapping because they were being changed by Green Velvet. I hadn’t recognized Green Velvet’s name, but I knew his music. His signature track “Answering Machine” (along with its obscenely catchy hook of “I don’t need this shit!”) had long been a rave staple. Ira, my hip-Chicago-plugged-in savior had told me about the rave when I called him that afternoon, and now we both danced under the stars, moving in the tangle of bodies, moving with the music within us…

…grubbing on pizza and wings at Innjoy, a hip little bar near Ira’s apartment. Joining Ira and I are two others from the rave: Ira’s friend Sonya and her friend Rachel.

Rachel and Ira, meeting for the first time, were hitting it off famously. She worked for an extremely large advertising company that did ads for Nintendo, Phillip Morris and others. The thing was, she was wearing knee high socks, a short skirt and raver buns. I realized, sitting there, that this was okay. More than okay.

There had been a schism amongst my friends after college. Some began professional careers, got married, bought homes and started having kids. They were no longer into going clubbing or having seat-of-the-pants road trips. But my other friends, still partying and working hourly wage shit jobs, had too little responsibility and didn’t understand my concerns about such little things as, oh, there being drunk sixteen-year olds at their parties. Plus, they didn’t have the funds to travel. So I had been torn. Half my friends couldn’t stay out late, the other half could barely make it to work in the morning. I straddled the middle, with neither end completely approving of my life.

But here was Rachel, completely comfortable with being a professional by day and a grubbing post-rave raver in a bar on a Tuesday night. Here were the four of us, college degrees all around, having a late-night great time and the focus of our conversation was neither home decorating nor drugs. It was a lifestyle confirmation, and that made me very happy…

…listening to a high school opera group perform mediocre opera in Millennia Park. The park, only recently completed, was an interesting clash of influences. Behind the opera group were Greek Corinthian columns supporting nothing but air. Around them was a huge photography exhibit called Family Album, dozens of 5’ X 4’ prints of families from around the world: an Indian family with their pet elephant; an African family, both of the sons cradling AK-47s. Behind me was a giant sculpture, nearly twenty feet tall and in the shape of a jelly bean. Its surface was reflective, warping my mirrored self as I walked around it. To my left were two monoliths, both two stories tall, with video screens that displayed smiling children, water running down the monoliths onto the playing children below. I have a Kevin Bacon connection to that art installation. A friend’s boyfriend’s aunt’s husband designed it. Seriously. To my right was a Ghery designed open-air concert hall. I sat on the grass and listened to the Grant Park Orchestra rehearse for a performance that evening…

…relaxing in a Chicago bookstore, reading a bit about its history. Apparently “chicago” is a Potowami word meaning either “raw onions” or “skunk cabbage”.

…getting free food at Mod, an upscale restaurant where Ira works, where even a tiny bowl of macaroni and cheese costs $12…

…touring a museum. This is great to do in Chicago, as there are many, and most are free. The museum of Contemporary Photography was showcasing both an exhibit on twins and another on the prostitutes of Calcutta. The Chicago Cultural Museum had a very cool exhibit on underground comics, from feminist think pieces to ribald sex fantasies. The Museum of Science and Industry was not free, but I still paid to go there two days in a row, once with Ira, once alone, simply because it’s a fantastic museum with fantastic interactive exhibits. As part of its exhibit on movie making, for example, you get to make a trailer for a fictional movie. Luckily, I got picked to be one of the two stars…

…watching OutFoxed, an independent film playing in Chicago that I knew would never make it to Oklahoma City…

…walking down the Magnificent Mile, Michigan Avenue, home to some of the world’s top shops, the testing area for many a franchise. Crossing a bridge, I saw a really cute blonde girl walking in the opposite direction. I flashed her a smile. She smiled back. That’s what I love about traveling: I’m bolder because these people will never see me again.

Half a block later, I stopped to watch a street performance. Three Jamaicans were performing acrobatic stunts in between funny banter. While I was standing there, the cute blonde walked up and stood beside me. Not right beside me, but still beside me. As she had been going the opposite way, my assumption was that she had turned around to talk to me. Before I could say something to her, she ended up getting pulled into the act. The trio lined up a group of nine people, including the girl, and then and one of them did a complete flip over the entire line.


After the stunt, the girl stood beside me once more. I turned to her. “What was it like?” I asked. Banal question, but the best I had at the moment. She looked at me, then looked away. Oh. I guess I misread the entire situation. She hadn’t come to talk to me after all. After the performance was over, one of the performers said something to her as way of thanks for her participation. A look of confusion crossed her face, and she didn’t respond. Suddenly, I got it.

Turning to her again, I said, slowly: “Do you speak English?”

She nodded. “A little.”


Her name was Jana and she was from the Czech Republic. She lived in a village an hour outside of Prague and was in Chicago visiting her brother, who was an architect. Her English was better than I had first anticipated; it was simply a manner of slowing my speech down so that she understood.

As the crowd had dissipated, leaving the two of us standing alone on the sidewalk, I went for broke: “I’m going to the Museum of Modern Art, four blocks that way,” I said slowly, pointing. “Do you want to go?”

She thought about it for a second. “Yes.”

So we went, talking along the way. She told me about the Czech Republic, about her travels in America. I told her about going into Peace Corps, that I might learn Russian, which her parents spoke. She said that if I went to Prague (just a 12 hour train ride from Kyiv), I should contact her and she would meet me there.

I asked her to teach me a bit of Czech in case I did go, the basics: hello, good-bye. Then, going for broke yet again, I asked her how to say “you’re beautiful.” She smiled and said “Sesh haska.”

We arrived at the museum and I paid for us, and then we wandered its floors, looking at an art installation of hundreds of pencils stuck into a wall, a room made out of pressed packing foam.

She had to leave after that, was meeting her brother for dinner. Walking her to the L-train, we got to talking about stereotypes. I asked her what she thought of Americans, and she said that she thought most were arrogant, but that I didn’t seem to be (little does she know). She asked me what I thought of Czechs. I said I didn’t have an opinion about them, that she was the first Czech I had met. She asked me what I thought of her.

I said: “Shesh haska.”

She smiled again. Now at the L-train stop, she gave me her e-mail and then a hug. A kiss would have been great, but a bit much to hope for considering we had just met two hours before. We e-mail about once a month now, and if I do ever get to the Czech Republic, she says that I need to come see her village…

…checking out the Frank Lloyd Wright designed “Robie” house with Ira…

…flying home, missing my friends and missing Chicago already…