Chicago (7 page)

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Some mornings I would get up crazy early and take the very first bus downtown along the lake—the Sound Asleep Bus, as its driver called it. This was Donald B. Morris, whose name I learned on the first dark morning I boarded the bus; I had forgotten to get tokens, and had not a cent on my own personal person, but I greeted the driver in an ingratiating way, and began to mumble something about not having a cent, and he smiled and said his name was Donald B. Morris, and I was welcome on the community of the bus, and he would cut me slack twice but not more than twice, was that clear? I said yes sir and he said Don't call me sir, son, my name is Donald B. Morris, and I believe there is a seat right rear window for you. No one like that seat because the hump of the wheel there and some trick of the engine make it too hot for comfort but you young and can bear the heat. On this bus we are a peaceful people and there is no loud music or any of that. Generally on this bus people sleep until we arrive downtown. Your ride is my treat this morning. Next time the
last
time I treat. Also do not board the bus and ask passengers for change. That is not done on this bus. When you are seated we will proceed. Estimated time of arrival at Dearborn Street is twenty-two minutes. Pleasure to have you aboard. If you look out the left side the bus you will see the sun coming up over the lake in about twelve minutes. Do not stare directly at the sun. My advice is look at the lake in
front
of where the sun come up. Such a shimmer is rarely seen. Here we go.

Partly because Donald B. Morris was such an interesting man, and for reasons having to do with work, I began to take the Sound Asleep Bus fairly regularly in February, rising at five in the morning and showering hurriedly and then trying to time my sprint to the lakefront for exactly 5:39 for Donald B. Morris's punctual arrival at 5:41. After a few rides I was granted a seat directly behind Donald B. Morris, which I took to be a great compliment, although it might also have been the case that I was the only person actually awake on the bus except for Donald B. Morris, and he rather liked having someone to talk to; everyone else got on the bus, went to their usual seat, and fell asleep so thoroughly that Donald B. Morris would have to go and gently wake most of them when we arrived at Dearborn Street.

Donald B. Morris, it turned out, was a gifted and amazing monologist, and the pattern of our conversations was set early on: I would ask a brief question and he would sail off on an erudite and endless commentary on religion, politics, history, the Chicago transit system, music, natural history, plumbing, and most of all football, especially his beloved Chicago Bears. It was a near thing, I discovered, between religion and the Bears for which thing he loved most in life, and I learned to switch him back and forth between them with a question if he got too monomaniacal about one or the other. His speeches about the Bears were often hilarious, and featured every sort of scandal and crime and peccadillo and misdemeanor—it turns out that bus drivers, like policemen, know everything about everyone, especially their vices—but his religious talks were even more interesting because they would occasionally soar up and away in the most amazing fashion. Some combination of the early hour, and the sleeping passengers, and the slow rising of the sun from the lake, and Donald B. Morris's indisputable imaginative gifts, sometimes led him to say things that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside him, and caught him as unawares as me; for example one morning he told me he had been in the war, and had been saved from death by a horse where no one had ever seen a horse before, and that this horse was, he was absolutely sure, sent to him by the woman some people call the mother of God, although he himself was of the opinion that She was herself in some way
also
God, because to put gender on God is just silly, gender is a human being thing, and God is no human being, total respect to the Jesus people. Now young Jesus, who was an Arabic boy, we forget, may well have been
sent
by God, and he may well have been some
part
of God also, or
infused
by God, or
was
God wearing human being
skin
for a while, but to say, well, Jesus the
only
form of God, all the other
possible
forms of God no way could they
be
God, well, that is just silly, and arrogant too. How the hell we know what shape God taken over the millions of years since universe was sneezed into being? Hey? Who knows the shapes and songs of God? Not one of
us,
and that is for sure. Better to pay attention and see if you can see some of the fingerprints where God was or is. Like for me that island with the horse. But here we are at Dearborn Street. Watch your step. God bless. Go Bears.

 

8.

THERE WERE SO VERY MANY THINGS
that were riveting and amazing about Chicago to me that year—remarkable people, the deep sad joyous thrum of the blues, my first serious excursions into dark wondrous jazz clubs, the vast muscle of the lake, the mountainous snowfall, the cheerful rough rude immediacy of the bustle and thunder of the city at full cry, the latticework of the elevated train tracks, the deep happy mania of Bears fans, the thrill of being paid for work rather than paying for ostensible education, and so much else; but I suppose what absorbed me most, in those first few months, was the sheer
geometry
of the city, its squares and rectangles, its vaulting perpendicularity, its congested arithmetic; I took to roofs and fire escapes more and more that winter, climbing up not only on my apartment building roof but on the roof of my office building (nine storeys) and the occasional hotel, given the chance while sentenced to meetings for this and that. I summited the Blackstone, on Michigan Avenue (twenty-one storeys), and the Palmer House, on Monroe Street (twenty-five storeys), and the Burnham, on Washington Street (fourteen storeys); I very nearly climbed atop the Chicago Stadium, the huge old boxy castle where the Bulls played, but chickened out due to ice on the roof; and I got as high as I could in the Hancock building, which was a thousand feet high, by slipping out onto the roof through a service door and briefly contemplating the meticulous jumble of the city far below.

All my life I will remember those few minutes a thousand feet in the air over Chicago; I could see where the city ended to the west, and turned to fields of snow and stubble; I could see north and south where the city vaguely morphed into Indiana and Wisconsin; and best of all I could see how the tremendous lake, stretching far out of sight to the east, held the city in its immense cold gray hands. I had expected to be amazed by the incredible welter and shapely chaos of the city below me, the countless jostling structures shouldering and crowding against each other, veined by streets and alleys, stitched by train lines, dotted with floating gulls and crows like scattered grains of salt and pepper, but I had not expected to be so stunned by the lake. It had never occurred to me that something could be far bigger and stronger than the city, but this was inarguably so, and I walked home that night along the lake, marveling at it, and a little frightened too.

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Miss Elminides remained a shadowy and elusive figure to me deep into the winter; no matter what time I arose and ran for the bus, or slept in and sleepily shuffled downstairs for empanadas and the papers and the mail, I never saw her going to work or in the hallways; and no matter what time I came home from work, or dashed in and out on the weekends with my basketball or on my late-night adventures in pursuit of music, I never saw her coming in or out, although often I could see her bay windows lit from within. The only time I saw her, it seemed, was when she wanted to speak to me, and this always happened in the lobby by the mailboxes; I would be reaching for my thin scrabble of mail, when she would suddenly appear at my shoulder, murmuring gently about a jazz club I really should investigate, or a gyro shop on the west side of the city where the spanikopita had healed two children of serious diseases, or the train schedule to White Sox games, which were only two months away, hard as it was to believe in baseball in the marrow of a Chicago winter.

After a while her illusory presence began to seem amazing to me and finally I bearded Mr Pawlowsky about it one evening when he was clearing out one of the storage stalls in the basement. I remember this discussion particularly for two reasons: his muffled voice emerging disembodied from behind and beneath dense layers of mattresses and boxes and jackets and clothes-hangers, and the way in which we had a gently honest conversation about romance without ever mentioning the word or the idea directly; a particularly male approach, I suspect, although perhaps women also have sidelong conversations in which you each row close to but never quite directly at an island between you; let alone actually
land
on it, God forbid.

He said, faintly, from behind the wall of dusty possessions, that Miss Elminides was a remarkable woman altogether, and one of her many virtues was what he would call a masterful discretion; some people might call her shy or retiring but he himself much admired the way she grappled with things as they were, when it was time to come to grips with them; for example her mention of the White Sox now, in early February, was sensible in that pitchers and catchers reported to training camp in Florida next week, so baseball is suddenly in the air, which is especially delicious given that we are in the icy snare of winter at the moment, so to speak, and what could be more cheerful to think about than hot summer days and beer and a decent outfield for once, and also what trains to take to the park when the Sox open the regular season in April? Similarly Miss Elminides mentioning a particular gyro shop; for one thing she has exquisite taste in Greek culinary matters, as you now know, so you can be sure that if she tells you to go there it will be a stunning experience, but also the fact that she told you about it is tantamount to saying there are other and deeper things to be discovered there, and she knows you are a journalist, so in effect she is saying to you there are amazing things to be found, if you take the hint, which I assume you will. So are you dating anyone or what?

He caught me by surprise, and also I was at that moment holding up my end of a huge bedstead that weighed a ton and surely once belonged to Gargantua or Pantagruel, so I was silent for a moment, and then I said well, yes and no, or properly no and yes—that I was not dating anyone seriously, but that I'd had a few dates, here and there, when I could squeeze them into my busy schedule.

Your busy schedule, came his voice from behind the bedstead, being basketball and jazz clubs and blues clubs and prowling alleys with Edward? Those are the things keeping you from romantic exploration?

I explained that basketball was the greatest of games, and invented in America, as were jazz and blues, and as a man new to Chicago I felt the need to see and feel and hear and smell and touch the bone and thrum of the city myself, fully present and attentive, undistracted and alert to idiosyncratic and unique flavor and rhythms as I could be, Chicago being, as he himself had said, the most American city of all, what with it being in the middle of the nation, and shouldered by great waters, and roaring with industry while surrounded by agriculture, a visionary city open to the world but sure of its own place and grace, king of the plains, dismissive of the arrogant flittery cities of the coasts, a vast verb of an urb, but one still built for people, one where neighborhoods were villages, and all the villages from far South Side to far north, from the far west to the Loop on the shore of the lake, threw in together to worship together at common altars, for example the Bears and gyro sandwiches and a decent outfield for the Sox for a change. And if you admire Miss Elminides so much, and she clearly admires you, and you are single and she is single, why don't you ask her out?

That floored him for a moment and I expected him to come out from behind the bedstead but he didn't and after a while his voice said quietly Did I tell you whose storage stall this is?

No.

The old lady in 3C, the lady who used to be an actress in the Broncho Billy films. She died this morning. Her name was Eugenia. She really was an actress in the first Westerns filmed in Chicago and she loved it but she married a guy who hated that she was an actress and he made her get out of the game. She put all her costumes and posters and props and stuff in trunks and boxes in their house in California and never opened them again as long as he lived. When he died she sold their house in two days and came right back to Chicago on the train with all her trunks and boxes and got an apartment here and all that stuff is in her room. This stuff is all
his
stuff that she didn't want to sell or give away but she didn't want it in her room either. I used to go up there some days to pretend to fix something and she would be happy as could be, all dressed in character from one of her movies. One movie she was the sheriff's daughter and another she was a girl rustler and another she was a wrangler and another she was a Comanche princess. All that stuff is still up in her room. She was the nicest lady you ever wanted to meet. She was in plenty more movies but I don't know their names. The only thing from the movies that she couldn't fit in her room was this horse, which is why he is down here. I don't think she had any kids, so we will have to do something about this horse. What a nice lady. Never a harsh word for anyone. All she ever wanted to do was be an actress, I guess. Let's haul the bedstead out into the alley and then call it a night. Tell me if you know anyone who needs a stuffed horse.

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Not only did I climb to the tops of hotels and other buildings to try to see the city as a whole; I also haunted alleys then, being young and supple and swift afoot if necessary, and I made a conscious effort to cut through every alley I could find, on the theory that alleys might show me more of the real salt of the city, its undertones and foundational colors, the bones beneath the shining flesh. It seemed to me there were far more stories in and among the alleys, where I found the more unusual residents of various species, including once, to my astonishment, a badger, although that might have been someone's pet.