There’s a shaky situation where I find myself at times, riding on the Chicago city bus. It’s a sunny Spring afternoon, so everyone’s using the unusually comfortable Chicago weather as an opportunity to walk outside. There are perhaps a couple people aside from myself riding. They clutch their reusable cotton-knit grocery bags and stare absentmindedly out the window. It’s a vacuous, deserted, moving space. The sunbeams cut into the bus and light up the residue left behind on the blue velvet seats: potato chip crumbs, specks of glitter, strands of gray hairs, loose change, tattered bits of paper, dust and ashes. The hanging o-rings for people’s hands sway back and forth on the long metal bars along the main aisle. The bus shifts left and right over potholes, bobbing the passengers and myself back and forth, cradling the babies and the elderly to a half-sleeping state.
I smell the scent of sweat and piss on some of the seats from where I sit, all the way in the back, in the middle seat. From here the bus aisle resembles a long hallway waiting room, where people read magazines and papers they find on the seats as they enter. Some stare at the advertisements adorning the side-panels and some stare out the window and some stare at the other passengers. They wait for worn-out names to be called by some unseen male voice: “Damen, Ashland, Racine, Halsted, Roosevelt, Canal, State.” Then they get off. But I ride along, waiting for the driver to loop back around on his route back south. Traveling in circles comforts me.
And so the night darkens the alleyways while streetlamps and storefronts flicker lazily on to illuminate the drunken humans making their way across the sidewalk-stages, their makeup and wardrobe prepped in time for their own personal stage performances, acted out with each gesture and line. Each joke is followed by a cackling laugh and each sip of beer is followed by a belching sigh.
I step off the bus and meet up with my friend Dorian, the greatest shit-talker known to the Chicago south side neighborhoods. The streetlights are off, probably from a power-outage.
It’s dark and my eyes take a few minutes to adjust to the darkness around me. Eventually I make out things: trees decorated with torn plastic shopping bags, rusty benches riddled with graffiti, red-eyed rats making off with a piece of garbage in their mouths, the crooked porches of houses, loud cars with shiny spinning rims, unattended children running past carrying naked dolls and faded playground balls.
A voice cuts through this dark neighborhood toward me.
“What the fuck are you doing, you tryin’ to get yourself killed?” Dorian spits out in an admonishing whisper. “Get over here.”
I spin around, squint my eyes, but can’t see where he’s hidden. Beside me, I hear a faint knocking on glass. I peer into the back window of a minivan that’s next to me. The windows are tinted and I can’t make out anybody inside. Suddenly, the car behind the minivan flicks its headlights on and off quickly. I walk over and clamber into that car.
“Power went out or something?” I ask.
“Motherfucker’s can’t even give us one month without some sorta bullshit, man, I’m telling you,” he says. “Last month was that firetruck that took two hours to get here. Two hours! You know what it’s like to see a little baby girl burnt up and crying her soul out, man?” The whites of his eyes grow big in the darkness and I know he throws his hands up in exasperation as he talks because I hear his fists thump the roof of the car. “Fuck it man, let’s drive.”
He starts his car and his headlights shoot into the back window of the minivan in front of us, revealing two small children cuddled up under a blanket. Like moths, they get excited by the light and come up to press their noses against the window, knocking on them as we drive away.
“You’re a brave guy to be still here,” I say. “I mean I don’t know if you have a choice or not, but I admire your courage.”
“Naw man, it ain’t like that, man,” he says. “People be sayin’ it’s bad but it ain’t. I know I talk sometimes like it is, but it ain’t like that.”
I feel bad, like a judgmental prick. “I’m sorry for being like that,” I say.
“Ain’t nothin’ to it,” he says right off. “You keepin’ it real.”
He puts on a CD of Bukowski reading his own poems in his angry old man voice: something about how people’s best and worst trait is hiding their own fear.
We drive downtown to the bright lights and foreign business peoples in black business suits. We drive further north to the young revelers wandering between the parties in the dark neighborhoods. “Want to go to that bar?” I ask, pointing to a sign with a single flickering sign, “The Friendly Tavern.”
“Nah, I got a spot,” he says.
We drive past a large public park lit up by tall, strong lights. I see brown-skinned kids scurrying around on torn up grass playing soccer and hear them yelling Spanish at each other. I’ve seen them before, playing in the same corner of the park every week using large orange cones they stole from street construction sites. The field they play on is brutally beaten up. Really, they are playing on dirt with islands of grass. I can see the skin on their ankles, calves, and shins caked in dirt kicked up by their cleats. Behind them are middle-aged men and women playing baseball at the diamond with an outfield boasting smooth, green, uniform lawn. A couple times, a baseball would be shot into the middle of the Mexican kids’ soccer game and a pale, blue-eyed outfielder clad in a numbered jersey would run up and grab it without paying any mind to the soccer game.
I look back at the park as we drive further away, the baseball players and Mexican kids getting smaller but the large prison-like lights still jutting into the black-yellow sky like glowing eyes.
Dorian takes an exit for the Stevenson Expressway, heading south. I don’t bother to question where he’s heading. I trust his wisdom, a wisdom one gets from having troubles in one’s life.
“Aye man, check it out,” he says, pointing to the orange construction posts lining the expressway. “Like I was sayin’, they can’t give us one month without some sorta bullshit.”
We hit a long line of cars that stretches off miles off into the distance. All the cars with their red brake lights blinking off and on crawl along like one giant caterpillar. The crawling slowly shakes my eyelids closed and I dream about green caterpillars bursting into butterflies, a painfully inevitable metamorphosis. I awake with a start.
The air whipping into the open car window onto my face has a hint of the country air in it. I open my eyes and find the huge black sky engulfing Dorian and I in his little sedan gradually curving southward on the gray highway surface tattooed across the Illinois earth. “Where are we going?” I wonder to myself. Sweet smells of cornfields and pungent manure float in and out of the car.
There are flashes of lightning off in the distance, lighting up everything for a split second at a time. In that split second the flashes illuminate the sleeping earth and all that covers it. Silhouettes of rotting barns outlined by lightning. Vast cornfields and their green-yellow heads like a million little children packed together off into the horizon lit by lightning. The clouds slowly drifting by, uncovered by lightning. The flashes of lightning quicken pace, bursting like a photoshoot in the distance.
“This is beautiful,” I say.
Dorian shrugs.
“Is this the spot?” I ask.
“Nope,” he says.
A lightning flash makes him look like a mad scientist, his dread locks like a pile of shaking snakes bathed in the silver light. He adjusts his square-frame glasses and presses down on the pedal, churning his beat car onward. It starts to rain and so he closes the windows. He tells me about how he hates how kids are in the neighborhood where he lives, how they sit around with their beat lives and grow more jaded about it with every forty ounce they drink or every cigarette butt they flick into the street. I tell him about how I hate the old people in the neighborhood of the small town where I’m from, how they only step outside to mow their lawns or how they coop themselves up to watch their daytime soap operas and bitch about how the neighborhood’s going to hell whenever some youngster drives by with their car that’s way too loud.
Thunder claps ring around our conversation.
We didn’t go to a spot. We just drove and drove and talked and talked. And when we got tired we turned around. The sun came up, orange light getting into Dorian’s gaping mouth as he slept in the passenger seat. I squinted to see the yellow highway lines against the sunrise searing into my eyes.
