Thursday, August 29, 2013

Chapter 2--Chicago

            Sorry about the delay.  Technical difficulties, which should not happen again.  

            I didn’t really have anywhere to go, and, surprisingly enough, I didn’t really have a lot of money to spend on a hotel.  What I did have now was one hell of an appetite.  I’d stopped once for gas and picked up a couple sticks of beef jerky, but that was not enough to really tide me over.  I pulled off the interstate onto Western Avenue, and headed what I thought was north.  I traveled through a neighborhood unlike what I’d seen in Des Moines.  Homes and apartment buildings piled close to the street, set back only by the sidewalk and a small front yard.  I drove past a street where a large Puerto Rican flag sculpture spanned the street.  I saw small grocery stores and restaurants.  A high school with metal detectors at the doors.  I toured through this foreign territory for a while before  got turned around and somehow ended up in downtown Chicago.  At what had to be rush hour.  I had never been to Chicago before.  I’d never left the state of Iowa.  So, this was a change.
            Throngs of people walked the sidewalks.  Well, maybe not throngs, but a lot of people.  More than I was used to seeing in Des Moines.  And there were restaurants, little corner places that looked like they were owned and ran by people who lived above them.  Street lights lined the broad streets that were full of angry honking people in a rush to get somewhere.  As I sat there in my small compact car, I wondered where everyone was headed.  The car ahead of me was driven by a larger gentleman who was slamming his fist on the steering wheel as he yelled out the window.  The woman in the cab next to me was pointing repeatedly as the driver tried to wave in reassurance to her, but she didn’t seem calm.  And the buildings shot out of the ground into the sky casting shadows that the streetlights could barely hold at bay. 
            I followed the involuntary caravan of cars as they headed north onto Lakeshore drive.  The cool fall air had set up residence here, as I could tell from the colors flashing through the leaves of the trees—some of which were already littering the lawn that lay between the road and Lake Michigan.  After about an hour, I made it past three exits and got off.  I had no idea where I was heading, but my stomach was telling me it needed to be a place that served food.  It was time to get out and tour this alien landscape.
            I made my way to the intersection of Broadway and Belmont, found a space and proceeded to parallel park.  It only took me ten minutes and three attempts, but I managed to squeeze my compact car into a space a mini-van had just pulled out of.  Apparently, even my police training hadn’t prepared me for parallel parking in a city as cars bear down on you, threatening to take your spot if you can’t get take it. 
            But after that ordeal, I shut off my car, opened the door and stepped out into the cool fall weather.  My stiff legs enjoyed the feeling of freedom as I shut and locked the car and began to walk down the street.  For the moment, I forgot my stomach’s demands and walked north, past the chain drug store and past the storefront window with people running on treadmills and the many little shops with shiny bobbles.  I stared in the windows, walking slowly as people passed me quickly moving decidedly toward the places their lives were taking them. 
            Finally, at a street called Cornelia, my stomach re-asserted itself and I ducked into “Fast and Fresh”, a small restaurant on the corner.  I ordered a sandwich and some fries from the man behind the counter.  He was a short man, brown, unkempt hair and from his accent I would guess he was from Eastern Europe somewhere.  He shuffled a cup over to me and I filled it with some much needed caffeine and at down.  The café was empty except for me, the guy behind the counter and a mother sitting with two children, helping them with their homework.  The kids, a boy and a girl, were both elementary school age and they both appeared to be working on math.  The man brought my food and went and sat with the family.  I ate my food quietly, enjoying the feeling of family in the restaurant, even if I was only doing so by extension.  Watching them working together on their homework made me feel pangs in my stomach and I finished up my food quickly, stopping only to refill my cup before I walking out.  I glanced over my shoulder as the father patted his son on the shoulder and offered a congratulations in a soft, but certainly foreign language.
            Out in the street, I continued north until I hit Addison.  There was a small, beautiful church, that if I saw it alone in a picture, I would’ve assumed was from the middle of Iowa.  It was unassuming and had originally been white, but was now soiled with the dust and dirt of the city going about its business.  I turned left and headed toward the one thing I thought I might recognize around here. 
            I’d been watching Cubs games on TV since I could remember.  In fact, if things had turned out differently, I might have turned into a Cubs fan.  Luckily for me, though, I was saved from that fate by a father who loved the St. Louis Cardinals.  Even if I question some of the other things he gave me in childhood, I can always feel good about that.  Still as I passed under the El, I thought about how I thought seeing Wrigley for the first time would be amazing.  People don’t always realize that the Cubs’ top minor league team is in Des Moines, so I saw Gregg Maddux, Mark Grace, and a bunch of other people before the people of Chicago made them into heroes or goats, or whatever they do here.  But when I got to the stadium, I was almost overwhelmed by how small it is.  I walked around the square block it’s situated on and amused myself with the thought that it must be October, because the stadium was empty.
            As I walked down Clark to complete my circuit, I saw him.  I should have known from the way that others avoided him that he was trouble.  You can’t always trust the knowledge of the mass of people, but sometimes the wisdom of random people on the street is right on.  But as I approached the corner of Addison and Clark, he approached me with his hand out.
            “Do you know where you’re headed?”  Normally, this type of question would’ve been greeted with some sarcastic quip, but the events of the past weeks had thrown me off.  And I realized as I replied that I hadn’t talked to anyone for anything other than to order some form of liquor, for a long time.
            “I don’t,” I said as my voice quivered and the street lights flicked to life on the block south of us.  He thrust his hand out further and I shook it, letting go just as the lights on our block came to life.

            “It’s a wise man who can admit he is lost.”  He said with a shy, unassuming smile.  “You can stay with me.  Come along.”

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Chapter 1

Chicago started as an escape.  Well, it started as San Francisco, but became Chicago.  You’ll see.
Mindy James, my ex-girlfriend, had been killed a couple weeks before and Des Moines had been too much after that.  The job—finding her killer--seemed like the only thing that mattered.  Friends--the few that I had--and family faded into the background as I focused on retribution.  But, as you might expect, the anger and depression made me sloppy.  Mindy and I had been in a relationship that had ended in tears, bruises and a police report that I hid from the rest of the officers investigating her death and the series of similar murders that happened around the same time.  And that’s how my career as a Des Moines Police Officer ended.  It had been coming for a while before that, though.  Years of dealing with people on both sides of the problem had gutted the parts of the job I liked, leaving just the husk.  It’s easy to hate the thieves and pimps and the myriad other people who act to make the city a worse place to live.  But after years of working, I found myself hating the victims too.  Not that they were at fault for their suffering, but the way they would look at me—their eyes teary and red, or hard and expecting, or angry, or disappointed—it stopped making me feel like I was helping.  It made me feel like I was just someone taking an order, same as anyone at a fast food shop. 
            I still remember the last night as a cop.  I was sat down, and there was a lot of yelling.  There’s some dispute about whether I was fired or I quit.  Not that it matters at this point, but I still contend I quit.  I slid the gun across the Lieutenant’s desk, happy to be free from the weight of it.  The badge, however, slipped from my hand almost the way breath seems to slip from my lungs—without effort or thought.  As the Lieutenant closed his hand around that shining shield, the room seemed to darken.  I didn’t know why—especially after the way the last couple months of alienating pretty much everyone in my life.  My partner suspected me of murder.  My best friend wanted to believe in me, but he wasn’t sure after my erratic actions.  And the woman I had once thought I loved was dead.  And I didn’t have a dog, so I was alone.  Alone, but I felt free—at least that’s what I told myself.
That night I came home angry.  I stopped to get a bottle of cheap whiskey a couple blocks from the apartment I rented.  I left my car in the parking lot and started to walk home with the bottle.  By the time I was home, I’d drained the whiskey and was trying to remember if there was anything else at home.  I found a couple odd beers in the fridge and opened one up before heading to the closet and pulling out a suitcase.  I tore the drawers out from my dresser and dumped the contents into the suitcase, zipped it shut and sat on the bed and started to cry.  The tears were warm and smelled of whiskey and as I sat there, I could feel the morning’s headache start to crawl into the sides of my head.  “Always have to pay for the stupid shit you do,” I muttered to myself as I snuck under the covers and waited to fall asleep.  It was a long wait with the last couple months sitting on my chest, but finally the night was shrouded by a foggy state, which I guessed was sleep. 
            I awoke in vomit, as the sunlight streamed through the window splitting the room, and my head.  Dust motes played in the light playfully and for a minute I smiled at the beauty, before my stomach lurched and I threw up again.  I climbed out of bed and clumsily brushed the cold vomit from my mouth and chest as I sat up and looked at the mess I’d made.  I picked the suitcase off the bed and stood it by the closet door as I went to the bathroom holding my head and barely making it to the toilet in time for another round of sickness.  The next few mornings started about the same way.  And the days passed as you might expect, I’d watch TV during the day, nursing myself back to a state resembling humanity.  I’d get calls from my former partner that I wouldn’t answer—her voice on the answering machine seemed genuinely concerned, but she never dropped by to check on me.  I would tell myself this was the last day of this bullshit—now I needed to figure out what the hell to do with myself.  But I always ended up passing a bar or liquor store and stumbling home and waking up with a headache that was more excruciating than the day before.  Some days the headache was joined by bruises and scrapes that I couldn’t explain until I would try to enter a bar either later that night or soon after and the bartender would explain to me, usually rather colorfully, that I was no longer allowed to enter that establishment.
            And then, one day as I was watching Price is Right sucking down some orange juice and trying to decide if I was going to be able to keep down some breakfast, I got up out of the chair, picked up the suitcase and got into the Toyota that I’d bought a year before.  I was going west—the decision was made.  San Francisco maybe.  I’d wanted to visit since reading the Maltese Falcon.  San Francisco would be good for me.  No more snowy winters.  New people.  No family.  No partners.  No expectations.  Just a warmer climate with some sun and the ocean.  I had never seen the ocean, couldn’t imagine something so massive.  I tried to imagine myself sitting on a beach staring as far as I could across the ocean—straight into eternity, maybe—but my mind couldn’t picture anything larger than Lake Ahquabi.  Yes, San Francisco was the place for this defrocked police officer, I thought as I took a right onto I-80.
I was smiling suddenly.  San Francisco was going to be great.  It was exactly what I needed, I thought to myself and flipped on the radio.   “Ain’t got no cash, ain’t got no style.  Ain’t got no girl to make you smile.  Don’t worry.  Be happy.”  I smashed my hand into the radio five times, before the music stopped.  It was also then that I noticed the sign that said I was 6 miles from Grinnell.  I was headed the wrong way.  I entertained the thought of turning around at Grinnell, but I didn’t want to see Des Moines again, so I kept on going.

            Five and a half hours later, I found myself in Chicago.  

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Guess what?

New story coming.  I'm hoping to have it up by this time next week.

I've been writing it for a while, but I'm trying to make sure I've got it ready to go so once we start up there will not be any delays.  I hope you all enjoy it.

Thanks for your patience.