Written March 6, 2007
Jeff, I think it's going to be a long, long time ... before you can buy that. Didn't know you had an Icarus complex, something deep inside you that wants to fly off a mediterranean island and flit too close to the sun?
I was not the man I am at home when I sent you that Chicago text message. I am now sitting on my porch, using free wifi. Wardriving lives ! I texted the Chicago song to you from the blue line heading down town....
There's something worse than a red eye flight. It's the last flight that drops one at the airport after ten, and requires one to catch the first flight out the next morning. It should come with a hotel night, but it doesn't. I wanted to be in touch with my inner Nelson Algren (http:\\www.nelsonalgren.org/). Follow the link because the picture on Nelson is priceless. Nelson changed philosophy forever by picking up Simone De Beauvoir, Satre's companion, at her reading in Chicago. Simone B. had her first big O, compliments of Nelson A. And then Simone B invented the women's movement
So, hobo at heart that I am, I bought the cheapest, safe accomodation in Chicagoland, the 24 hour pass, at 5 dollars the night. So I boarded the blue line for Clark & Lake, picked up the Brown Line to Kimball, after talking with a boy - girl - boy circle of Moody Bible College students out on the town. The young ones from Port Huron, Michigan or Davenport, Iowa are probably missionaries in training learning how to repair bush planes and write sermons, practical Christianity for African gospel bringers to be. They knew of an all night Starbucks at the Brown Line and Sedgewick, and shephards of men, they offered to tell me when to deboard. All I had to do was, "get on with us". You know they were "Christians by their love".
But I was heading to a place on Belmont, a place where a Christian goes when she's tired of churching, near a stop on the Brown line that was making its last run for the wee hours but also a stop on the red line that runs all night. You don't need to look at a schedule to know that it is an all-night line. Merely look for the huddled masses in the carpet upholstered chairs, yearning to snore and dream. I have no idea how a piss break is handled, but I've never noticed piss bottles or smelled fresh urine when riding an all night line. You can sleep underdisturbed if you master an urge to void.
Clarkes on Belmont is smack bang next to the Belmont stop turnstile, and it houses a restaurant with happy couples booths in vinyl and the main dining room connects to a bar with a tap that can be legally pulled until 4:00 AM. If you are looking for pancakes with Jaegermeister syrup and bacon with a whiskey chaser, Clarkes on Belmont is your place. The all night diner is a short walk from Belmont and Halsted, a street that is marked with rainbow statues, claiming it for those who double their chances of dating on Saturday night by being bi. I wasn't looking for a happy couple booth, unless the pair of girls I saw kissing on the subway had allowed me to buy them breakfast, and so I sat at the bar, drinking ice water from a carafe, enjoying pancakes and bacon without liquor to make them go down quicker, and I finished writing out the last four pages in a moleskinne reporters journal I started New Years Eve, 240 pages of new year's resolution made real. The two boys sitting in the happy couples booth behind by spot at the bar's corner were mirror images of one another, down to the chins and spiky blonde hair. The waiter was very attentive, and without too much trouble, he stopped calling me sir.
Around three in the morning, on the Belmont platform, I began the 2 hour run back to O'Hare, noticing young people sitting on the benches under the heat-lamps, reminding me of fries waiting for customers at a Woodward Avenue Chicken Shack. But some of these girls, toting their Lulu Lemon carryalls, didn't get on the trains. The wait was short. The Red line car was full now, including a woman and a man leaning into one another, sleeping cheek to cheek. He wore a stocking cap in black embroidered in white letters: 1001 Laborers, a working poor guy at home with his family. The red line connects to the blue line at Jackson under the loop, and I noticed the tunnel between the lines, a quarter mile walk perhaps, had been lined with red granite marble since my last visit. The tunnel still had gutters at the corner of floor and wall to drain excessive fluids. At the blue line platform on the O'Hare side, a man dressed in a frayed snowmobile suit and a silver spray painted face danced robotically to a boombox: "Don't Push Me Cause I'm Close to the Edge". And he could cantilever out over the edge of the platform at a 45 degree angle to prove it. A man wearing sunglasses and frayed clothing smiled, and I could see no bottom or upper incisors. He opened his wallet, and put a bill into the robot man's bucket. He yelled at me, "Everybody, put a fiver into this artist's bucket !" Sunglass man was standing next to the blue platform border when the next train slowed down. When the doors closed, he was still there.
I caught a few winks as the blue line whisked me out to O'Hare, and so did the members of the TSA who were commuting up to their posts. When I arrived at the O'Hare platform, a team of tranport authorities were spraying the platform clean with powerwashing jets, and several women squeegeed the filthy water off the platform and into the railbed.Subways are for Sleeping 1961: 46 years of little progress
No comments:
Post a Comment