Note: This is the first chapter of my memoir in progress.
It’s September of 2012, the Friday before Labor Day, and I just quit my last nine-to-five job. I didn’t plan it that way; it was one of those odd, perfect coincidences that emerge, occasionally, out of the complex sprawl of a life story. Now that it’s all over, as I walk away from my former office downtown, an autumn breeze rising off the lake, sharp with the threat of winter, cooling my hot cheeks, I stop short with a little wobble of irony when I realize what day it is. That kind of coincidence makes it hard not to feel like an intelligent universe is winking at me.
The late afternoon sun flashes gold, blinding, on the mirrored glass of skyscrapers far above. Panic is alive in me, thrashing against my ribs. I merge into the foot traffic on E. Wacker Drive. Press my phone to the side of my face. Stop short behind a group of tourists who have halted, four abreast, in the middle of the sidewalk, ohhing and ahhing at a troop of teenage street performers. One trilling ringtone. Two. As I push past the tourists, all assertive elbows, moving across the street and toward the river, one of the teens turns a perfect backflip over hard concrete and I find there’s still room, in my palpitating heart, for awe.
Three ringtones. Four. I rest my forearms on the cool steel railing of the riverwalk, my elbow just wide of a spot of chewing gum, clutching my phone against gravity, pumping up the volume against the roar of traffic, gazing down at the rushing water, breathing in the scent of the Chicago River. There’s a freshness to the smell of running water, even when the smell of rot is pungent and assertive, too. It confuses the senses. Every spring, the city dumps gallons of dye into the river for St. Patrick’s Day, and for a few weeks the water is a bright, audacious green, and sunlight glitters on the little ripples like they’re facets of an emerald. You can clock the time of year by the vividness of the water. But even now, in the sludgy fade of late summer, the river is working it, playful, sparkling, sun and shadow dodging each other in the patterns that emerge where the water hits the cement bank and laps back on itself.
Five rings. And then—your voice, like the ocean surf hissing up to the high tide line, like a lover’s quiet breathing. The ecstasy of being soothed. My hands still shake from stress chemicals and way too much Adderall, but my spirit is suddenly soaring with the skyline, rushing with the river. I spill the whole story in a gush of relief. Then I insist that you acknowledge the irony.
“What irony?” you say.
“Monday is Labor Day. I quit work right before Labor Day,” I explain.
“A giant step forward for disorganized labor.”
Your mind is a delight. I picture you with your phone in hand, and maybe you have feet up on a desk, leaning back in an ergonomic chair, in your brother’s family home in Hyde Park, which I have never seen, puffing up like a smug city pigeon, delighting in my delight. You say,
“You’re amazing. You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever known.” And I think you still mean it. This is the twilight of our good times. Last weekend’s fiasco was a turning point, or a tipping point, and I must know it. But for now, I soak up your affirmation til it’s running off me in rivulets. Finally, having had my fix, I hang up.
Where am I going? Home, I guess; to the commuter train, and then the Andersonville apartment into which I only just finished unloading my moving boxes, and for which I have still, somehow, to pay. But not just yet. Leaving the river behind, I turn onto North Michigan Avenue, heading into the upscale shopping capital of the Midwest. Tiffany. La Perla. Swarovski. Confections in pristine window displays. The rich smell of chocolate from the Godiva store. My mind races, buzzed with adrenaline, with knowledge of my precariousness, the exhilarating shock of vulnerability, of stepping forward into thin air, not knowing where I might land, or whether anything at all will catch me. A man sits on a crate by the entrance to Bloomingdales, his elbows braced against his knees, holding a paper coffee cup with some coins rattling in the bottom. He’s youngish, sunburned, with patchy stubble and thinning hair, his sneakers wrapped with duct tape. Behind him, two women emerge from the revolving door, pulling their black peacoats closed against the breeze. The crowd parts around me and I swallow an emotion I can’t name. I rummage in my jacket pocket and drop a folded bill into his cup, wanting desperately to do something right.
Sometimes I’m terrified by the capriciousness of my own generosity.
Sometimes I feel like we are all just wearing costumes. Like if everything extraneous were stripped away, we would all suddenly recognize each other. Blinking. Naked. Human. “You? Yes? Me too.”
Monday is Labor Day. My great-grandmother on my mom’s side was a labor activist, a socialist and a union secretary, in Pilsen, just south and east of here, in the postwar years, at the beginning of the 20th century, before speakeasies and Al Capone. My grandfather on my dad’s side actually worked in the building where I have just given notice, back when it was the old Montgomery Ward department store, rather than the Crayola-colored open-office funhouse Daily Deals startup that I will never have to set foot in again, back when the boys were just returning from overseas and the world was just beginning to understand what had gone on in the Nazi camps. What would they have thought of me? Of all of this?
I have deep roots in Chicago. And I love this city with an open, breaking heart. I love its grandeur, its audacity; the gritty machismo with which it faces those terrible winters; neighbors pushing mountains of snow off their cars in grim solidarity; workers trudging toward the train, squinting against the cold, swaddled in parkas; chic, practical Hunter boots leaving deep tracks in piles of unshoveled snow in my north side neighborhood. Human genius is written into the landscape—from the layout of the streets, to the alleys and sanitation, to the statement skyscrapers downtown, glittering jewel-like with rich orange light as the sun sets over the Ferris wheel on Navy Pier. I love the elevated trains that wind in and out of downtown, the beating heart of the city; an urban circulatory system carrying throngs of people from the center to the periphery and back again. (And I guess in this analogy we are hemoglobin, and oxygen is money.) I love the way language breaks into nonsense as I move through crowds; a million strange voices rising and falling, as if the city itself is speaking in tongues.
It’s August 11, 2024. So much has happened between 2012 and today that I’ve got to wonder, like Theseus, if I’m still the same boat I was 12 years ago. I’m older, sure. I’ve been married and divorced. I’ve been through two years of chemotherapy and four years (and counting) of complex multisystem chronic illness, an ongoing initiation that has burned away a lot of what was self-defeating, compulsive, or extraneous in my personality. Like the rest of my world, I’ve been transformed by the engine of global pandemic. And like the rest of my nation, I’ve been through four years under the leadership of a legitimate madman—which made it harder to pretend that any of these emperors have clothes. And then there’s the continuing, collective process of waking up to the unraveling of the planetary body in which we are embedded. And the dizzy acceleration of information around us, and the growing confusion and divisiveness of the way we story our world, the gnashing and rending of algorithmic teeth. All while we reckon with the shadow side of our world in livestream. The bold hubris of modernity, the ironic nihilism of postmodernity, and the weird earnestness of post-postmodernity are giving way to something new. Something that doesn’t yet have name or form. The old world is drowning us in its death-throes. Blah blah blah.
So why am I writing about this time and place?
A friend asked me that today, with some impatience, as I complained about the weirdness and fallibility of memory in general, and my own memory in particular. Why do I want to write about this period of my life? I think what he was really asking, with the annoyance and incomprehension we often feel for addictions and obsessions we do not share, is why I’m still hung up on you, James.
Which I’m not. At least, not in the way he thinks I am. Still, I wasn’t sure what to say. You are a question to which I don’t yet have the answer. Do I need an answer? I don’t know. And honestly, a part of me has some trepidation about venturing back into those dusty, forgotten spaces. I believe in ghosts. I’m a little afraid.
Anyway. I think in large part I’m trying to pull this disorienting period of my life into context. So much of my story has been lost. So much of myself has been lost. I am calling back through time, hoping the echoes will bounce off the corridors of history and memory, a kind of locational sonar for the person I was, who will somehow hear and find a connection to the present. I don’t believe that time moves only in one direction. We experience events in forward motion, one after another, but stories move the opposite way, reaching from the present and future back into the past, weaving events into relationship retroactively. The weavers are usually depicted—by the Greeks, by the Norse, by that fucker Neil Gaiman—as women: maiden, mother, and crone collaborating through the open window of the present moment.
September of 2012 is the sunset of our good times, James. The castles that we built together are starting to collapse. Twelve years later, having been turned inside-out and reassembled in about a million ways, with the benefit of hindsight and a much clearer idea of who you were, who I was, and what was actually happening, I still go a little hot and cold inside when I remember you. And the absolute stunning perfection of the fantasy we made together. I miss the way you smiled and called me darlin’—tight-lipped, hiding your teeth. Your voice rising and falling with the cadence of incantation, clouding and clearing my head. I miss the way my body thrilled and cringed when your eyes went hard. The heat of your breath. Your fist twisting in my hair, my scalp burning like an answer to a question. The perfection of our dialog, our exchange. You saw into my demented corners and stayed. I never felt such clarity. Such selfish wanting. Such searing helplessness.
My memory of those years is in scraps and tatters. Whole swathes of it inked out like the mostly useless versions of top secret documents that get released to the public record. I do not know where this writing, this attempt at weaving together history from the scraps of memory, will take me, but I am willing to take the journey. Thanks, reader, for coming along for the ride.
I’ll end this chapter with a nod to daddy Nabokov—
“Look at this tangle of thorns.”
This is WONDERFUL! I love the direct address and the concrete details of the city, very evocative. And this line, it is incredible: “I am calling back through time, hoping the echoes will bounce off the corridors of history and memory, a kind of locational sonar for the person I was, who will somehow hear and find a connection to the present.”
Can’t wait to read more!
Amazing as always! A pull into the memoir itself...can't wait until I can read the whole thing!