Return to Chicago

I lived in the city of Chicago for two vivid years after college, when I played amateurish drums in a slate of raucous rock bands, haunted bars, late-night clubs, and Wrigley Field, drank enormous amounts of beer to compensate for not doing drugs, and generally squeezed into a brief period the wild and crazy youth I’d never had.  One day in July I packed up a rental car, borrowed my bass player (to share driving and return the car), drove to Tucson to get married, and never went back.  That was 27 years ago.

One memory that’s come back to me this week is how, when I first moved to Chicago, I spent a month at my friend Robb Drinkwater’s loft while I househunted.  Today I’m crashing with that self-same Robb as I revisit my old stomping grounds, giving me the weird feeling that I’m starting it all over again.  But of course times have changed, for the city and for us: modernist condos and upscale restaurants have remade the old Wicker Park neighborhood, and Robb and I are both in our fifties, divorced, and content to spend our evenings on the couch with tortilla chips and Netflix.  In the mornings he trundles off to his teaching job at the School of the Art Institute, and I prowl the neighborhoods for good coffeehouses where I can work on editing my novel.  As always it’s great to see him (we’ve remained in close touch over the years), and as for Chicago, it’s been great to simply walk around and soberly take it all in. 

The city still has a feel all its own: the low buildings, the broad skies, the long flat avenues extending into a V of distance, the smudged brick facades with inset checkerboards of frosted-glass windows, the ethnic neighborhoods hovering between urban decay and hip creativity.  Off the main streets much is unchanged: naturally I had to walk past my old apartment building, and it looked exactly as it had on the day I drove off for Tucson.

This unprepossessing place is where I used to live...

Downtown was a different story, on the day Robb took me on a tour of his school, located in the heart of the city across from Millennium Park.  On the Magnificent Mile I could still pick out the Gothic stone turrets of the Wrigley Building, but subsumed in an aerial invasion of blue glass to all sides, including a shining 98-story M-16 barrel identified as the Trump Tower.  Returning my gaze to ground level in time to avoid bumping into office workers I took in three-story display windows for haut-couture franchises fit to rival Madison Avenue, all new.  Robb and I agreed that the constant flux was appropriate for what had always been the financial/architectural hub of Chicago; still, it was reassuring to pass in through a door and find a venerable art college still holding its expensive ground under the flag of the Muses. 

After the tour of the school I went across the street to revisit the great Art Institute museum, while he finished his day of teaching.  The museum welcomed me in just as when I was 24, undisturbed by the addition of a new wing, and it was a pleasure to greet familiar paintings for whom a quarter century is a blink of an eye.

I was actually there to see a special exhibit on early Soviet art.  It was a well-structured exhibit, with separate rooms for Home, School, Work, and other aspects of revolutionary life, but alas, despite my general Trotskyist sympathies, the art couldn’t really compete with the masterpieces of the bourgeois world, at least in my opinion.

At any rate I had to tear myself away from the museum to meet Robb, and it was a long-forgotten pleasure to take the rattling El train home past the low brick rooftops, back windows, and alleyways of Chicago.