2004-07-24 - 1:20 p.m.

Now. A new home. New lands to traverse. New people to know. New routines to create. One must proceed with care.

So it begins with a walk in the rain. Shiny streets, hip cafes, attractive young professionals around every corner, and me. Me walking around in my band-aids. The new me, scabbing over the old me.

I wonder what this new routine will be. I must wait for it, like a cat on its haunches, prepared to rush at it when it pops out. Perhaps I will come down this street every Thursday, maybe I'll hang out with some future friend at the Coobah.

I'm twenty-eight now. I keep telling people it's a perfect number, so it will be a perfect year. Only they don't understand the concept of a perfect number, so I have to keep telling them it's a number where the number is equal to the sum of its divisors (or is it factors?) so that 1 plus 2 plus 4 plus 7 plus 14 equals 28. And by that time they have forgotten what I was talking about.

So this is the perfect year. Waking up to my rubbled apartment, all the chairs but one gone, no food to eat, no change of clothes to wear, my life strewn across the floor, the shower blasting over my aching arms and legs.

This place was so much to me for four years, but now it is dead. No, but it was never the apartment that I liked. I enjoyed myself despite this apartment, made it comfortable, but really for how long was I ever really comfortable here? Where was I more comfortable? Back at the barrio? In college? Each was an adventure on its own, and the setting never more than backdrop. As will this new place disappear into the background, and the same old plotline develop, of the same old me that never seems to change.

Ah, but Uptown was something, was it not? The Uptown of years past, of exploring the park, of heading to Jake's, of discovering all that was real and good and human about Chicago, that was something. That was a time of optimism, of hope. Why do those times always slip away? The friendly hellos morph into growls, and you find yourself growling back.

It all started to be so unwelcoming. First, of course, came the eviction notice. Well, not an eviction notice per se, but the polite notification that they were turning the place into condos and we had to go. They gave us four months, but we stayed five, hanging on as construction workers passed outside our window, the back porch covered in a layer of dust. But that back porch, one will miss, those mornings with the paper, or those afternoons when the sunlight angles in.

But one day the porch door wouldn't open, and you had to go through the window to get out. I pried off the lock. Another day a scaffolding was erected that barred shut the front door, and the mail stopped arriving. Our friends next door were robbed, and one night as I was falling back to sleep at the end of a hot restless night, I heard two loud cracks of fireworks that were revealed in the morning, by the blood pooling in front of the el, to be gunshots. It was time to start looking for new places anyway.

One day after looking at a potential new home, I found Mark with a facecloth to his eyebrow. "Oh, hey Dave, I'm kinda bleeding in here," he told me. He filled me in on the way to the hospital: he was on his cellphone when the kids came running up, must have been ten or fifteen of them, and one swung out and hit him in the face. A moment later they were all around him, pushing, punching, kicking, and he was scrambling out and running off down the street, his bookbag left behind. A neighbor walking his dog took him in, gave him an icepack, and drove him down the street, but the kids were long gone.

So It wasn't so sad to be leaving. I looked over the nice new neighborhood I would be living in and smiled. I ordered a cell phone and a lap top to accommodate the new lifestyle I imagined, out of the ghetto and into respectable society.

I looked at a half-dozen new places. The happy home of a gay couple; a musician�s art-project apartment; an overgrown, paint-peeling 'intentional' living facility. I finally settled on a place just south of work, with three young professionals: Alex, William, and Steve. Alex, the active, swimming, fun-loving young woman. William, the wry, chatty architect. Steve, the soft-spoken, easygoing Steve. So I had someplace new to live.

Ah, but there was more to see in Uptown, or at least it seemed that way a month ago. That new Borders looked so inviting, that Starbucks so sinfully delectable. But now the color was washing out, the sterile order uncomfortably superimposing the dirty wilderness. The workmen showed up outside our window, scrubbing off the age. Long tubes stretched from the fourth floor to the dumpster below, sucking out the past. A white powder filled the air and covered the porch, the stairs, the grass.

On that last weekend, the weekend I had to move away, I had my cell phone, and I had my laptop, and finally I could talk on the phone and use my computer at the Starbucks. But I had things to pack, and move, and throw away, and carry downstairs. They positioned a long dumpster right below us, and we tossed over our past, indiscriminately, garbage bags and appliances and papers that fluttered all over the ground and missed the dumpster completely. Looking down over it I felt uneasy, as I always do when I look a long way down. Thoughts of jumping or falling invade my head, and though I never consider it, the fact that I could so easily consider it, and it would be so easy to do, just swing my legs over the railing and go soaring through all that empty space, just the fact that I am able to have that thought sends me backing away from the edge nervously, wondering just what I might do.

But then there was a chance, and I took my laptop to the Starbucks, and sat there and did my homework. It felt like I was in this strange other world, straddling Uptown and Lakeview and somehow living in both, this Lakeview Starbucks and these Uptown roughnecks scowling out from their group. Uptown is Lakeview, and Lakeview is Uptown. I can go out from my Starbucks work session, and walk around my favorite old neighborhood, only the laptop bangs against my leg as I walk, and my new load of machinery leads me to eye everyone with a bit more suspicion, and keep my distance just a bit more.

I cross the street and pass in front of a group of kids, eyeing them suspiciously, watching them watch me, feeling my new computer slap against my leg. Then I sense them moving behind me, and there is a crack, and I look back and there is smoke and a kid running toward me yelling Oh shit, and someone back there is aiming something, maybe a gun it�s a gun and I burst forward, as long and as fast as my legs will carry me, and I and my laptop go soaring forward, my hands and knees skidding across the ground, and all can think is Am I hit? My back? No. Not yet. and Maybe I can dart into this crevice, but then, maybe he will come over here and shoot me down. Instead I scramble to my feet and lurch forward, until I am around the corner where I am safe. As I stagger toward my gate, watching the kids go racing past in glee, not fear, my hands and knees and elbows scream what the hell just happened. Vaguely I remember it is Fourth of July and those were fireworks not gunshots, and I just have to get inside and get packing but goddamn it hurts.

previous - next