Borderlands: In the Far North Air

A storm's been lazily roaming the sky all evening, dropping rain any which way as it becomes too heavy. Just now, though, came a crack as loud as any I've heard in my life, the kind that sends sound rolling away a long time down the curved edges of the earth. Now rain drives up to the building to stay. Neighbors' voices click on around the courtyard.

Earlier I took my dinner at the Ethiopian coffee shop across the street, and when I came out a man was standing in the bus shelter, playing jazz trumpet out into that moment's downpour. It was a too-perfect opening credit sequence to some film noir, and the strip snapped shortly as the player began to righteously rail against some enemy, real or imagined. (There may, after all, have been some heckler out there in the shadows, obscured from me by the rain.) Still, he started up again.

In Rogers Park we often get a little music with our weather. Some confluence of factors turns these blocks into a sort of magic-realist realm—the old hippies, the new students, the park and lake. A few weeks ago Heather and the dog and I went out into the water on a still hot night. The moon was a piece of gleaming alien currency casting a pink path across the deep; I followed drifting over sandbar after sandbar as in a dream one dips between lesser and higher states of consciousness and control.

In my childhood I invented precisely one ghost story. It was simple in its outlines, was exquisitely sad, and allowed me to show off my singing voice quite well, I thought. A girl whose name I recall as Marigold lived in a house on the shore. She woke up early one morning to the sounds of beautiful singing that, had she been a real girl, she would have found annoyingly derivative of the music in The Little Mermaid. The house was large and weathered and white; the girl rose from her bed, closed the screen door softly behind her, and went across the sand seeking its source. She reached the ocean's lapping edge, but the song was still out there somewhere ahead. With eyes alert and placid brow, she began to wade in as the song kept sounding. And she followed and followed, never to be seen again.

I was not interested at the time in Marigold's salvation, but two decades later as I resurfaced as far from shore as I could walk (I don't swim well), I found that a suitable hero had appeared on the scene. He had climbed the lifeguard's white wooden watchtower and was playing a ukelele. He didn't seem to be attached to any of the few small groups on the sand; he was simply there for our safety, luring us back to the human shore with scrappy bits of song.

Another night a young man with an acoustic guitar strapped to his chest stomped and sang through the park all alone; the dog crouched and tucked her tail as if fear had jumped onto her back directly from a dark branch. And just after our move here, in daylight, a group of people in African dress sang and drummed in a wide semicircle, apparently just practicing in the bright air. More regularly, there are the Hare Krishnas, parading and chanting and shaking things; almost despite myself I like the sound, and return the smiles of the soft-eyed young women who often lead them. (They had a large festival a month or two ago and as we walked through the park an occasional emissary would come up and ask whether we'd like to join in some chanting, as if they were offering us a newspaper or a sample of a new kind of gum.) And the coffee shop on the corner holds an open mic night every week. The music is sometimes exciting, even if I suspect I'd roll my eyes at the words; I sometimes think of attending out of nostalgia, for I myself, oddly, hosted an open mic on the patio of an Ethiopian restaurant as a teenager.

If you are inclined to look on your life cinematically, this is a landscape that all but demands regular epiphanies. Yet this summer I've felt quieted and slowed, oppressed by a sort of humidity that only sometimes coincides with the weather. Largely the effect of uninteresting life complications and a heavy workload, I suppose. But maybe the vibrations of all these odd moments are finally synching up and, with the gusty early dark we're getting now, are starting to shake things loose. 

I felt that way, certainly, on Thursday night, pushing toward home from the southwest where I'd met Peter and struck up a plan to put our band back together after a dormant summer. Some minutes into my ride the clouds broke and cold rain flooded the streets, drawing astonished laughter out of me and then drowning it in the deluge. 

Eventually I turned onto Bryn Mawr and saw another cyclist ahead of me; he must, however, have actively decided to go out in the storm, because he was clad in one of those cheap, clear plastic ponchos. We were the only ones out in that quiet northwest corner of the city, and as I trailed him through the dark he was transformed every fifty feet or so by streetlights. As they caught his poncho, he he was turned briefly into a wild bag of lightning, billowing down the road. The plastic crackled in the wind as the rain began to fade. As long as our respective routes allowed I modulated my pace to follow him, a beacon of obscure but hopeful import.

Borderlands: Storms at the Gates of Heaven, Santa Fe

Even setting aside my tenure in Chicago, I have never lived quite in the center of any place. My childhood home was an easy walk to the next town over, and at college, in Santa Fe, you ran out of road and city as soon as you walked out the door.

Or climbed out the window of your dorm. I did this a lot in the first dorm I lived in, making full use of the fact that the floor was sunk a couple of feet below the earth. Climbing back in once caused me a little trouble: a couple of security guards had been watching me, and there was a firm knock on my door a few moments later. I dug out my ID to prove I wasn't an intruder, and eventually they went away, eyebrows raised, writing something in their log book.

This seemed like maybe a bad sign for my task of presenting myself as well-adjusted and definitely not crazy. In my first weeks at school I often had the sense of being a trespasser in a realm that was too warm and naive to cast the proper suspicion my way. Though plenty of space opened up around me later, on first meeting the girls in my floor charitably assumed that we'd all be good friends. So the evenings were well-lit and full: gathering around as one of the guitarists played and sang earnestly (all of them quicker-fingered and sweeter-voiced than I; always I've been surrounded by more talented people but kept banging my drum anyway), drinking tea, watching movies.

I recall sitting down at my desk one evening and noting an inkling of distress at this wholesome good cheer that was subsuming me. Could I really feel anything like nostalgia for the mostly awful summer I'd just left behind—filling out one doomed job application after another, fighting with my family, taking long, heavy-hearted walks at evening to force my body into sleep?

I went out into the twilight and down into the red arroyo. The late-summer air had a broody weight. There was always a strange intensity to dusks in the stormy season there. Everything was dim, but somehow still sharply outlined, the sky a bright gray. It seemed that just beyond the semi-translucent dome of it was shining a powerful, cold silver light. The landscape was more austere than the woods I'd similarly wandered in Michigan; before I left, an older friend correctly predicted that I'd love the enormous skies but miss the deep forest. The number of native species seemed charmingly countable, set down with a Noah's Ark–like comprehensibility: piñon, aspen, sage, pine, lavender, jackrabbit, mule deer, horned toad, whiptail lizard, rock squirrel, chipmunk, raven, scrub jay, western tanager, sparrow, canyon towhee. And coyotes, rarely seen but heard nearly every night, singing a song that was alternately otherworldly and mockingly familiar—some nights you couldn't tell at first whether the baying came from them or a group of guys playing beer pong across campus.

As I walked through scrub brush in the vivid dusk, I came up an incline and onto a dirt road. A large bank of loose earth sat nearby, preparation for or result from some building project. I scrambled to the top and stood. Lightning took the landscape soundlessly in its grip a couple of times; I began to feel charged. Potentiality accumulated. Not far away, one coyote came out of the bushes, stopped just long enough to be fully seen, and went on its way into cover again. I felt the itchy sense of safety slip from me, letting a rawer skin breathe.

The other day, in a string of hundred-degree afternoons, a storm suddenly sent its heralds running before it. Wind made the trees that are all we can see from the front windows in summer writhe; dark patches blossomed overhead. I went out right away with the dog, who stalked plastic bags creeping like groundhogs across the road and romped after a styrofoam cup caught in a cyclone of dead leaves.

Storms have always made me giddy, too. Something is breathed into me that feels like a little bit of extra intelligence and extra capacity for delight. Every city I've lived in has seen me practically skipping through a downpour, smiling foolishly, each breath an interrupted laugh. (A storm's a good way to produce this feeling, but not the only one; as a young and religious child I connected it with the presence of God and the words "in a state of grace," despite not knowing quite what anyone else meant by that.)

We went past St. Gertrude's, an enormous Gothic church I'd been angling to get a glance inside since moving to the neighborhood. Now it was finally open, the immense wooden doors and the bottom panes of the stained-glass windows propped open to let in the rush of cool air. The service must have let out a while before: only a couple of clergy stood talking together in a far corner. It was precisely as I would have hoped: all white with gilded edges and lacy bits of stonework, severe arches traversing vaulted ceilings.

All in all, a place to temper the warmth of community with the chill of the divine. I like a line in David Byrne's "The Gates of Heaven:" An angel's breath is like the desert wind.  Even when I was religious or still trying to be, I never had any use for the cozier side of churchgoing. You can socialize anywhere. Why distract from the rare presence of the one enormous thing?

The storm never touched down, that evening in Santa Fe or the other day here. Eventually I must have climbed back up the arroyo and into my window, speaking to no one, and kept reproducing the lightning and coyote in my mind as I lay down to sleep. By the time I rounded the block in Chicago, the few drops of rain I'd caught had already been sucked from my skin back into the air. The loan period was up. I went back in.

Borderlands: Lakeview/Ravenswood 1 - Moving In

Real summer air came down over the course of about a single afternoon and evening a few weeks ago, and now it's worked its way in. Humid and densely nourishing if a little over-rich, heavy with the scent of lilacs and lawnmower fumes. It's just past the time of year when I'd normally be staring down my collection of flattened boxes and refusing to clean or put anything away since I'll just have to clean it all and pack it all by the end of the month.

I'm staying put for once, not that I've been immune to the flirtations of the For Rent signs. But this weather makes me think of the real work of moving -- after the giddy thrill of selecting the new, empty apartment and before the comfort of having burrowed one's way into the neighborhood. The work of being unsettled, trying to build new patterns of living and hoping that they aren't the wrong ones.

I feel like I've written incessantly about my first few months in the city, but that isn't exactly true. It's mostly just that my antennae were turned up as high as they could go; I seemed to feel everything three or four times over. (And it's true that I did narrate much of it over the phone, long calls to California that were the sole venue for a relationship for a while.) Later I transferred much of the mood of that time into an ambitious work of fiction I'm not ready to say I'll never finish. But it's still not done with me. In beginning to write this here, I realize that it will be a multipart affair; a density of delicate threads occupied those short seasons.

I would have been ready to take the first apartment I looked at in Chicago. My mother and her urbanophobic boyfriend were driving me around getting lost and hating everything while I became increasingly belligerent in the sincere hope that they'd kick me out of the car and drive away. The first place was at the corner of North and Kedzie and probably really was a worse apartment than the one I ended up with: small, dingy, with matted gray carpet on the floor and a bathrobed older woman wandering the linoleum corridor outside. $525 with heat, however; fair enough. The landlord seemed nice; my family hated it. As we drove north and east into Lakeview my mom was relieved by the increasing number of restaurants and coffee shops where, she noted, it'd be easier for me to find work.

She had a point. The place on Ashland had several dismaying features, but it was technically just within the officially desirable neighborhood of Lakeview, and close to two trains. So I could ignore the fact that the tub, in lieu of a showerhead, had a sprayer attached to the faucet; that something in the rental agent's demeanor suggested that the place had been sitting vacant for many months; that the '70s-era stove was not hooked up to the wall. It was a lot of space for a studio and for my barely-existent collection of furnishings -- good windows, a whole separate kitchen with space for a table, walk-in closet standing between it and the bathroom. I knew almost nothing about renting apartments and was a little surprised and annoyed that the landlords wouldn't let me move in that very day. It would have been so easy: all my things from college were packed into and strapped on top of the car (including the newish, shiny orange bike I'd bought myself, whose naive cable lock would be neatly clipped the first night I moved in).

So we all went home to Grand Rapids three hours away and packed it all up again the next weekend. My mother and grandmother somehow found some empty corners of the car to stuff with household necessities. "They have dish soap in Chicago, you know," I grumbled in embarrassment.

I suppose I had an idea about making it on my own, starting from scratch. As if some silverware and cleaning supplies would corrupt that vision. Everyone -- and not just my family but also the man at the bank who set up my new account and the parade of tradesmen who would pass through my apartment trying to make it livable -- was already extremely dismayed that I was staking my claim in a town where I had no job and no prospects, with only two or three acquaintances, a liberal arts degree from a tiny anachronism of a college, and $3,000 of summer-job money to my name.

It took three anxious, humid weeks to find a full-time job. I did manage to get taken on by a temp agency right away. They sent me on a handful of $10/hour jobs across the city, the first being a convention where my task was to sit at a table and request that French doctors sign in as they entered the conference hall. The French doctors fell into two camps: those who resented my presence deeply and those who were delighted by the terrible French I served up to them. (All had horrible handwriting, which we later were tasked with decoding into names to be typed into a spreadsheet; many of the words we ended up with clearly could not have been the names of actual French people, but no one we asked seemed to care whether the spreadsheet had any particular connection with reality.) The caustic Frenchwoman in charge of the temps clearly sympathized with the former camp; she'd spent a lot of time fussing with our appearance (I'd bought new clothes for the job, which I still own and still dislike) and nearly sent another girl home for wearing what were essentially fancy sneakers.

"It is not that you must wear heels to look nice!" she spat. "Look at her! Those are flats! Still appropriate!" The heels of my shoes were not flat, just covered by my too-long pants, but I took in the extremely mild praise anyway, feeling that I'd passed a test while shrugging sympathetically at the sneakered girl.

I have mostly not been very good at the various low-wage jobs I've taken, such that I can still recall nearly every tidbit of praise I've received while doing them. At the movie theater I was appalled and flattered and then appalled at being flattered when the manager who'd hired me confided to a small group of us that she "only hired attractive people." ("What about Ashton?" "I didn't hire Ashton.") There and at a couple of my restaurant jobs I served the occasional customer who caught me in a rare moment of efficiency and said, "Boy, you're really good at what you do." Part of me yearned to let them know that this was false -- yes, in the obvious way that I was actually an cringing klutz 90% of the time, but more than that I wanted to say, resoundingly: "This is not 'what I do.'"

When I finally got a full-time job it was at a Persian restaurant about two miles away, and when I finally lied that I'd gotten another, better job in order to quit as quickly and neatly as possible, the manager, Saad, said he was not surprised because, in his words: "You are very great person." I was surprised and incredibly touched by this. It was true that he'd been one of the nicest people I'd worked with there -- sad-eyed, seeming a little too smart and refined for the work he had to do, a man who insisted on trying to fix the watch whose back I'd removed and been unable to replace before very gamely admitting it couldn't be done -- but still: I had been a terrible waitress. I'd dropped a full glass of wine onto a man's chest and then desperately, idiotically offered to bring soda water to help shrink the ocean of purple soaking his shirt; I'd sent an entire tray of heavy, expensive lamb dinners crashing to the floor and then, when the replacement order came out, slipped in precisely the same spot and done it all over again; I'd brought customers dishes they had no intention of ordering through cultural-linguistic misunderstandings.

Saad seemed to understand that this was not "what I did." And though, as my boss, he certainly had the right to disapprove of me because of it, instead he accepted my chaotic presence in the restaurant and liked me well enough anyhow. He believed in my fabricated future.

This was valuable to me because "what I did" was very unclear at the time. I went long stretches between in-person contact with anyone who knew anything about the kind of person I was and the kind of goals I had. You have to make small talk with a lot of people when you first move somewhere: repairmen, utility workers, landlords. In response to their reasonable questions about what I was doing with my life, I had nothing to say. I was just here, taking up space in Chicago. Even after I got the waitressing job, I couldn't quite say: "I'm a waitress." It wasn't a career. "I wait tables," I'd tell them flatly, daring them to press onward. And I vacillated between being comfortable moving through the world as a cipher and aching for someone to intuit what it was I really stood for.

Maybe that's part of what made my first months in Chicago feel so hyperreal --  that no one around me knew who I was. I was the only one in charge of perpetuating that entity; I couldn't pawn off parts of the task on the job I had and the routines I'd established and the friends I interacted with. There was no shorthand yet for processing my day-to-day existence, that series of constant collisions with a place that didn't know I'd become a part of it. 

This is much of the work of travel, too, I suspect. Such work is exhausting, but exciting -- all that room for reinvention. I'd do it the same way again.

Borderlands: Little Village/Marshall Square

I have always tended, somehow, to live on the edges of neighborhoods, so that even when I have technically lived in a neighborhood acknowledged to be "good" or "hip," people are still always asking, "Oh, is that still a part of that neighborhood?" when I name my intersection. There was the one barely in Lakeview, or was it Ravenswood, more or less neglected by the maps; the one uncomfortably far west in Logan Square (though the bars that are deliberately divey rather than unreflectively divey and the little record shops have crowded nearly to that line of longitude by now; so it always seems to go, "progress" nipping at my heels as the moving truck arrives); the one practically falling off the riverbank of Lincoln Square and splashing into Albany Park. And now this one, a thoroughly settled-feeling patch of greenery and architectural flourish allowed by luxury rather than dictated by the minimal level of civilization belonging to its decade. But still just one city block out of Rogers Park. By one measure it is within Edgewater Glen. I use this measure, because I like the name.

Is it a money thing? Are buildings on the boundary lines cheaper, no matter what boundary it is? I am extremely cheap. The cheapest apartment I ever lived in also took me the furthest afield from the white, coffeehouse-inhabited nucleus of Chicago where nearly everyone I know in this city lives. It was $500 a month for a building that was essentially my own -- actually just the upper floor of a garage, connected to the main building by a covered staircase. (The lady at the phone company trying to connect my line was distressed when I gave "Garage" as my apartment number; I think we settled on #2RG or something equally unwieldy as a compromise.) But it was satisfying to look at the little chunk of brick with bars across the windows from across the parklet behind it and know that I inhabited all that space myself.

You could get onto the roof, but not from my apartment -- you had to go through the window of the man who lived on the main building's second floor, who invited me up one early summer day to drink beer and listen to Loretta Lynn. He was in his 40s or early 50s, lived with a roommate with whom he shared shouting fights the other neighbors had complained about and speculated (incorrectly, I tentatively guess) to be lovers' quarrels, and had decorated the apartment in psychedelic style. A two-bedroom, it could have been mine; I was offered it by my landlord, but, at $600, I felt it more responsible to decline. 

In retrospect my brief acquaintance with this man -- possibly named Michael? -- likely had a foundation of essential sketchiness, but I have always been embarrassingly willing to assume that people's intentions are none other than those which they communicate to me. In this case, a friendly welcome to the neighborhood. Even if he did a) claim to have been Soundgarden's original manager, b) talk excessively about his young and hot Korean girlfriend who would soon be flying in from California, c) invite me to go dancing that evening with some friends of his in Millennium Park, and d) ask me to help slather tanning lotion across his pink, substantial back.

Well, okay, yes. I gingerly applied the tanning lotion. I weighed the dancing offer seriously before declining. Some surprising corners of our musical tastes overlapped; he lent me some CDs. Would I do the same today? Well, probably.

He'd lived "all over the city," Michael said, and this was "the Wild West." I'm not at all sure how long he'd lived in the area; my memory is of asking and receiving a vague non-response. He took pleasure in the Outlaws headquarters on the corner, and enlightened me with the anecdotes that had made its bomb-proof door and razor-wire-topped fence necessary. (Whenever I walked by I had a vision of the scene from Pee Wee Herman, domino-ing the whole line of motorcycles down.) He prepared me for the head-poundingly loud weekly Mexican music festival held in some large tent whose location I could never entirely pin down. I still don't know which road it stood or stands on. Its swooping top shimmered mirage-like from my back windows, planted somewhere in the wastelands between lumberyards and demolished lots and the Cook County Jail, whose white, alien, razor-wired forms I could also see. The cops were bribed to allow this festival to operate as loudly as it did, Michael told me, in the way that older men especially are pleased to demonstrate their knowledge of the secret, corrupt workings of things.

I was mainly glad to have met a neighbor. Later some college kids moved in, the earnest, vaguely Christian kind who had vacated my own apartment and helped my family (my mother shell-shocked by my chosen surroundings) lug my couple armloads of furniture up the stairs, and I met them too. But I was much too shy to unspool my tentative Spanish to most of the people on the block; I'd just smile at the kids playing streetwide games of hide and seek and work my way up to exchanging a sentence or two with the adults.

(The English-speaking Lawndale Gardens project was across the street, but that block seemed mostly self-contained, and I'm not sure I ever really met anyone who lived there. Maybe a couple of kids, whose soccer balls I'd lob back over the fence when they dropped in from the park.)

I biked down my old block of 25th Street again on Saturday for the first time in a couple of years and instantly felt again as I typically did in that neighborhood when it was sunny and I was walking around on the boulevards. (California and Marshall, namely; the immediate vicinity was called Marshall Square, another corner of Chicago almost nobody at all has ever heard of. Though it turns out it's where Stuart Dybek grew up, and there are churches and alleys I know from both his pages and my wanderings.) I felt light. Hazily happy, with no particularly strong sense of self to attach the feeling to. Just a kind of nectar in the air.

The sunshine seems more expansive down there, in the same way the sky is bigger in the West. It's enhanced by how I always get there from the North Side: down Damen through the two or three blocks of pitchy tunnels that run under the freight lines just north of 17th Street and finally reward you with the pastel murals of Pilsen and the tinkling bells of paletas and elotes carts.This is the eastern edge of Little Village, depleted by the County's needs and, one supposes, by some mid-20th-century act of slum clearance soon after it stopped being an ethnically Bohemian neighborhood. Half-blocks of fenced-in grass, littered with rubble, are patched here and there among two-flats. (A couple more vast, gloomy warehouses have been pulled down since I lived there.) But there's still a strong enough web of community to keep it feeling like a neighborhood.

It makes me some kind of hypocrite, I suppose, but I feel weirdly oppressed when I am in a crowd of other young white liberals, young white city-dwellers in general. The Damen bus as it nears North Avenue, for instance. Their opinions seem a cartoon copy of my own, their slightly bad taste a corruption of my guiding aesthetic. I become a claustrophobic grouch, sniping at snippets of overheard conversation. So much privilege, real or imagined, makes me itchy. 

It does not feel natural for a neighborhood to be organized that way. Over and over, I sink myself into the dense city and immediately start swinging my arms to make enough space. The borderlands where I've wound up -- they do have that.