2005-09-15 - 12:14 p.m.
So, I�m in Chicago. Like, I live here. The Windy freaking City. In the Midwest. Richard M. Daley is my mayor and Barack Obama is my senator. I can see Lake Michigan out my window. And N. lives a block and a half away (we thought moving in together right off would just be rash). If you had told me in 1990 at age 16 �Geoff, in 2005 you will be losing your hair, using a wheelchair, and living in Chicago with your girlfriend, who�ll be the same girl you knocked up last year!�, well. I would have told you to stop hogging the spliff.
I think I popped my cherry yesterday morning. N. came with me for a doctor�s appointment at Rush Presbyterian in some distant area that�s apparently the city�s medical complex, with signs saying �How Medicine Is Supposed To Be!� (uh, free?). Afterwards, we looked for someplace to eat. A contractor in the area pointed us towards the Red Crown, a greasy hole-in-the-wall, and I got my first Chicago hot dog. I felt like it made me an official resident.
Chicagoans seem to be quite particular about their wiener style. A friend of mine who grew up here in fact once got a letter published in The New York Times about the proper dressings for a Chicago-style hot dog. It includes relish, chopped onions, mustard, diced tomatoes, and small hot peppers. It�s quite good. Note that ketchup is not involved here, which is a relief to me. I don�t approve of places that violate the natural order of things by putting ketchup on franks and mustard on burgers. Hello? Ketchup is for hamburgers; mustard is for hot dogs. It�s quite simple.
From there, we took a bus downtown. Boarding in my chair, I ran over a guy�s toes in the narrow aisle; I�ll have to work on that. In the back of the bus a guy kept up a very loud nonstop rant (I was secretly hoping he wasn�t actually addressing anyone in particular, but it was alas directed at some poor sap he was with) about racism. Or the black contribution to America. Or something; it wasn�t very lucid, although it was quite entertaining. He invoked George Washington Carver and Jesse Owens and the African-American architect of Washington, DC. I was waiting for him to get to the part about how OJ was framed, but he got off before that topic. He wins the prize for angriest black man of 1974.
We got off randomly when we saw an increased number of tall buildings and found ourselves near the Art Institute of Chicago. They were showing a special Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, so we went in to see it (we even got a discount for being Chicago residents!). A broad theme of the presentation was that the late-nineteenth century Montmartre artists generally depicted working-class (or often at least working girls and their bourgeois patrons) life as it really was, whereas the earlier Impressionists generally chose more abstruse subject matter and held loftier ideas of what makes Art.
But I feel like I�ve heard it attributed to several other groups of artists that they were the true origin of �keeping it real� and truly depicting street life. I�m not really sure though. Art history was never my strongest subject. Please jump in and set me straight if you know. At any rate, the paintings were very cool and Toulouse-Lautrec also did some beautiful lithographs for advertisements. And the Art Institute is just an awesome museum; we�ll be back.
When we left, we went to the edge of the Lake. N. wanted to go in, but there were signs warning against swimming or diving. She said she just wanted to jump in and float, but I insisted this would still go against the spirit of the law. We walked north for a bit and turned west at the Chicago River. It felt a little isolated at that point, wedged between the river and a highway. We wanted to get back to civilization to get N. some liquid (she�d been pushing my chair all that way � she insists it�s good exercise, but I still feel bad), but we must have missed the turnoff that bicyclists use to get from the lakefront to downtown (most places there are bicyclists, there are curb cuts).
We ended up trying to navigate our way through a sort of covered-over road system. This was pretty scary, as there weren�t really proper sidewalks, often just catwalks, and certainly few curb cuts. Also, there were a number of homeless people crashed on what pedestrian space there was. I said I wanted to get up out of the wheelchair and just camp out on a safety island for a bit. But N. was having fun zooming my chair through the roads and traffic was light, so I decided we could live dangerously.
We finally found a way out of the mess (it was a little like surfacing from being submerged) to the city outside. Except we ended up in this weird empty space. It was surrounded by blocks with huge buildings, but for several acres around us was nothing. It wasn�t a park, it wasn�t a paved parking lot, it wasn�t a construction site. It was just vacant land with some grass on it. And a restaurant. Yes, there in the middle of nothing was a small structure that proclaimed itself the Lakeside Grill. It had a patio. The whole thing seemed dream-like, but we sat down for lunch (I got another hot dog, of course).
The waiter explained that this whole area had once been a golf course. The restaurant had been the clubhouse. The surrounding parcel was the last to be developed. There would be a whole bunch of buildings on the land in a few years and the restaurant would be gone. Huh. This only furthered my confusion about development in Chicago. I know there are extensive zoning laws here (Houston is the only major city that lacks them entirely), but throughout the city low- and midrise buildings are cheek-by-jowl with highrises like the one I live in. I don�t get it.
We went back to my new home, where I passed out asleep for a spell. Then we got dinner and drinks at a neighborhood bar. I had a Polish sausage to switch things up a little. N. noted that I�d eaten more encased meat in a day than she�s had in several months. (I think she�s missing out.) I did recently have the idea of being vegan at home and only eating meat when I go out, but I didn�t really picture myself consuming a procession of hot dogs. Then again, I didn�t picture myself moving to Chicago either. Maybe I should rethink things.
N. stayed over the night. She says her apartment is really small and makes mine seem palatial, although I haven�t been there yet. I like when she stays over. I like it a lot. Things are starting out really well. Oh, I know it�ll get real cold in December and my student loans will start coming due. But for now, I�m in heaven.
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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