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.

Summer Tapes

The hiss of the end of a cassette tape as it spools out its pseudo-silence is as much a summer noise for me as crickets in the grass, box fans in the windows, cicadas in the trees. Lately it's been unbearably hot and humid (the answer to a friendly, drunken woman on a late-night bus who asked me a couple of times during a spell of March heat, "If it's like this now, how will it be in July?"), so even in the chill of my office I've been moved to revisit some of the albums I lazed and sweated through in summers as a teenager. Most of these were tapes of CDs I'd borrowed from the library and dubbed—foremost among them the Pixies' Surfer Rosa and an X anthology, Beyond and Back.

My music of summer is built on messy electric guitars. Fuzzed-out, thirsty, flapping frantically but in circles, thudding drums, vocals twitching with some sour desire. Each song on Surfer Rosa is a staircase the band flings itself down. The album buzzes with the useless energy that accumulates from staying inside all day, where it's slightly cooler, and not quite knowing what to do with yourself.

Violence seems preferable to such inaction; sex also springs to mind. The album starts with a tale of an infidelity whose course the narrator does nothing to stop: You're looking like you got some sun / Your blistered lips have got a kiss. Everyone I knew was spending their days together somewhere in the sun, it seemed; every fresh tan was a sign of betrayal, of fun to which I hadn't been invited. I saw my friends a couple of times a week, but compared to the vast social emptiness of the rest of my days it couldn't begin to fill my hunger for contact. One summer my boyfriend really was having an affair with someone, the rumor had it; for some reason I couldn't manage to care enough to believe or disbelieve it, though it was probably true since he dumped me before the summer was out. Loneliness is a powerful repellant, beads up uncontrollably from the skin.

I'd go anywhere with anyone at all. Ride out to Grand Haven to jump off the pier with some guys I sort of knew from the coffee shop. Tag along to parties that were all about drinking, despite the fact that I was straight-edge and terrible at interacting with people at parties. Buy some time by going on family errands with the friend whose car I'd planted myself in for the afternoon. Embark on some dates with an older guy who idolized Ayn Rand. (Complete list of what we watched together: tape of an interview with an elderly and quite charming Rand, Mullholland Drive, Quadrophenia, and a compilation of Depeche Mode music videos.) Most of this relationship took place in a setting that really did seem summoned from from the world of Surfer Rosa: his mother's house on a crowded outskirt of town, which she'd decorated with dozens of representations of the Virgin Mary. She and the Marys looked at me coldly when I entered the house for the first time; the other times we just slunk downstairs as she chatted in Spanish on the phone.

He stopped calling after about a week. Somehow that was okay, too—the Ayn Rand, after all. The next summer I learned that the reason for his sudden silence was that he'd had a psychotic break and been taken to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. (Were there signs? Not many. It's true that he'd asked whether, as a writer, I wasn't constantly worrying about people stealing my ideas. He'd also reportedly tried to set my friend's shoelaces on fire as a joke at a festival the day before we met, which I was willing to ignore because he wanted to talk about books and philosophy and go on dates with me.)

I'd come home from these wanderings late at night and often there were still a couple of hours to fill before I'd be worn out enough to sleep. I'd slide a tape into my Walkman.

The lyrics of Surfer Rosa are elliptical, and enunciation is not a core value of the style. What comes through is a preoccupation with hot weather and the Spanish language (Puerto Rico, where Black Francis had recently spent half a year), a disgusted sexuality tainted by thoughts of incest, and the summoning of violence upon oneself. "I'm the hard loser / You'll find me crashing through my mother's door / I am the ugly lover / You'll find us rolling on the dirty floor," goes "Break My Body." I lay on my mother's floor and listened, inking the song titles onto the J-card of the blank tape.

Given that I didn't have much money to buy CDs, I also didn't have much money to buy blank tapes, so I economized. Most albums were shorter than a 60-minute tape, and after one ended I'd start recording another on the same side. Because of this, my tape library forms a weird chain, like it's all one big box set; to listen to any one album in full you generally have to pop in multiple tapes. So The Pogues lead into Pavement's Wowee Zowee, which leads into Beyond and Back, which leads into Surfer Rosa, which, clocking in at 32:50, could almost fit onto a single side, leaving "Brick is Red" alone on its own tape. (Looking at this list you might think I was born no later than about 1980. But it takes time to catch up with the culture when you're coming into it as a teenager; I still haven't quite made it to the present, probably.) The hunt for the tape of "Brick is Red" to finish out the album gave that song its own crystalline quality—a more spacious, cooler coda to an overheated half-hour.

Where Black Francis had Puerto Rico for a site of doomy, semi-Catholic paranoia, X had Los Angeles, and the sense of doom there is more widespread. It's in the structure of things, in the water. The world's a mess, it's in my kiss. Accordingly, where Surfer Rosa feels like an album of being stuck inside in the heat, X's early records are about being stuck outside in the heat among other people who don't want to be there any more than you do. I hadn't really earned the right to these sentiments as a teenager on summer vacation—again, I was appallingly greedy for human contact—and consequently it didn't get quite as deeply into my bones as Surfer Rosa, even as I appreciated the similar lo-fi aesthetic, the hard, semi-opaque poetry of the lyrics. Now, though, X is just the thing for moving around in the city and its steamy subway stations, when every rotten smell and accidental elbow jab amplified, everybody looking deranged and diseased as advertisements leer from the sidelines.

X joins you in these feelings, but they don't endorse them, either. There's some sympathy even for the sputtering hatred of characters such as the protagonist of "Los Angeles" (the heat'll do that to you), but there's a greater, more fundamental empathy for the down-and-out of all stripes. We don't want to feel this way. We'd like these crowds to cure our loneliness, but empathy is probably the best we are going to do. All that's to be done is to turn up the distortion, grab the mic hard, and sing.

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.

The Embarrassment of Being Earnest

I.

Over a few days this past week -- mostly while packed into a car also containing my mother, my sister, her friend, Heather, and the dog, en route to and from the Red River Gorge where we were doing some small-scale backpacking -- I read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, just something I'd pulled off Heather's bookshelf for the journey. Everybody knows the story, I suppose: young man enthralled by Tolstoy, Thoreau, and his own depth of spirit sets out to make it entirely on his own, living off the land and then dying on the land after a mercilessly swift series of miscalculations. Krakauer attacks the situation with sympathy, especially in a middle chapter dissecting the chorus of sneering voices who chastised Chris McCandless for his foolish death.

        

From the available evidence, McCandless doesn't seem to have been an especially likeable person. I would, I think, have clashed with him across the seminar table in college, constantly prickled by the suspicion that beneath the discord our deepest convictions sang in unison. His notes are full of ardent underlining and rampant self-glorification. He seems to have treated other people highhandedly and with insufficient respect for their reality. But I don't think that fully explains why lives and deaths like his are held in such contempt, because there's also something defensive, reactionary, in the tone of the castigators.

There are certain lives that are popularly read as an act of judgment against mainstream existence, whether those living them would ever formulate such a judgment or not. The smoldering annoyance provoked by this continual imaginary judgment comes out against the less dramatically ascetic as well: there is for instance the scorn tossed at vegans, straight-edge kids, non-drivers (to name only categories of which I am or have been a member). And I've just as often fallen on the other side: how often have I rolled my eyes at the fasters, the neatniks, the taut creatures who organize their days around workouts?

All these people have given their lives a certain tentative form, and the more committed, like McCandless, a much stronger one. Such forms omit deliberately things widely considered worth pursuing; they refuse to frame their neglect to obtain these things as a failure. And, often accidentally, they function as statements, as argumentative positions that would be very uncomfortable to engage seriously in debate. So their deliberate omissions must be reframed as failures. They must be drawn into comparison and competition with the critic's normal life, which is shaped without much conscious intention by the essentially economic imperative of continual growth, acquisition. Any answer to the critic's challenge will typically serve only to make the defendant appear as fanatical, judgmental, and foolish as everyone has suspected all along.

Therefore it's better to be silent, assuming one doesn't in fact possess the strain of messianic zeal that made McCandless apparently insufferable. I yearn to go unnoticed when I turn down the cheesecake, just as in high school I gave only a cheery "no thanks" to whatever bottom-shelf bottle was being passed around, just as I demur on any number of more sensitive and deeper-seated subjects. I keep the scope of my convictions very small. They do not trespass on anybody else's life.

II.

"Would you believe -- could you hear without laughing  . . . that for years my secret ambition . . . was to stand up fearless and honest like Joan of Arc or Galileo --

         "And suffer for the truth?"

So says one of Joanna Russ's characters in The Female Man, and my laughter is only the laughter of sympathy. After I considered that martyrdom and ensuing sainthood might not be as accessible a career path as I'd hoped at age five, I still retained St. Joan as a role model and thought perhaps I'd enter a convent. At fifteen I'd abandoned religion or the other way around, but I still tried my hardest to find a way to accept the Christianity a friend of mine was trying to lead me back into by way of Chesterton and Anselm. I walked around under low, oppressive clouds for two weeks after smacking into what seemed the inarguable blank wall of Spinoza's Ethics, which casually and coldly did away with any meaningful conception of free will given its premise of an omniscient god. (It's not really much better if you omit the deity and start from a scientific, mechanistic standpoint, but the whole thing seems less invasive, somehow.) The knowledge nauseated me. Color was drained from every interaction until it crept slowly back of its own accord, as sleep must come after a long string of insomniac nights.

I mean to say that truth was of direst importance. I tucked a letter into the library volume of Spinoza beseeching anyone who'd gotten around the problem to assist me; I passed notes on the question to a bemused, unhelpful friend in class; I wrote a term paper for my community-college philosophy class that was little more than a wail in the general direction of the heavens and my professor. I got an A, but no answer. 

I thought I'd be a philosopher, probably (and just the mention of the word brings on a phantom chorus of cackling about useless degrees). When I finally decided not to swear off college, I went to the mountains and talked and talked about truth for four years. To get in, I wrote entrance essays on riding my bike (which my high school English teacher all but called boring) and on Robert M. Pirsig's work of pop philosophy Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I took very seriously, not knowing how little respect it was accorded. My youth is a chain of embarrassments, and not in the regular way of awkward and troublemaking teenagers everywhere.

But I also got a little more urbane at college, aided by friends who knew how to deeply enjoy ephemeral things and make cutting remarks in amusing ways. I'd never been a pure crusader for truth, anyway -- too lazy, too easily distracted. Imperfectly, I became civilized.

So I'm arch, I'm diffident, by nature and cultivation both, but push most any button and watch buckets of earnestness come pouring out. Just get me on a long car ride alone or a walk in the woods or at the edge of the shore at night and you'll easily harvest enough material to embarrass me further for years to come. For instance, I'm readily seduced by thoughts of wandering away into wilderness ready to prove my self-sufficiency. I loved many of the fellow creatures who accompanied me up and down sandstone slabs and switchbacks in Kentucky, but I also ached to travel those same paths in solitude and silence.

(Part of the appeal of being alone in the wild is, I think, the near-impossibility of really doing wrong. Most of my crimes against what I feel to be my better nature pertain to other people, or to making poor use of my time. There are no other people out there, and only a limited number of ways to spend one's time, all of which seem intrinsically worthwhile, if not virtuous. A very bright and morally simple reality presses in from all sides, leaving little room for error.)

A wary thrill rises in my chest when I meet a fellow natural pilgrim. My friend Kari once noted that she tended to date "Levins" -- after the Tolstoy stand-in in Anna Karenina, the spiritual seeker, agriculturalist, and railer against falseness. I seek them out too, on the page and as acquaintances; I wrote my senior thesis on Dostoevsky's Alyosha Karamazov and Prince Myshkin, two exemplars of tormented earnestness. But I also keep my distance from them a little, aware of how easy it is to be written off as a kook, to make oneself completely unlikeable in the rigidity of one's chosen path.

It's an odd mix: in many ways my character is built for strong belief. There just isn't much content with which I can, in good faith, fill those channels; it's a dry, impoverished truth I've ended up with after a youth spent trying and failing to make various doctrines add up. But my thirst for those big nouns -- the good, the true -- remains, ready to embarrass me and annoy any of the more sensible souls who come into contact with it.

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.

Big Things

Something in me says yes when, for instance, a train shakes past at close range and high speed. Likewise in the presence of heavy machinery: earth-movers, steamrollers, cranes. One nice thing about the sterile neighborhood of my office building is that something new is always going up, staking out another piece of the artificial land. For a few days last week, every time I tried to ride to work the bascule bridge at Columbus was being raised or lowered -- perhaps some kind of spring maintenance. I couldn't cross and, already being later than I'd hoped, stood one day as the traffic light cycled dumbly and the horizon shifted in an unexpected direction. The monolith of road towered toward me and assumed its place in the skyline. I have seen this only a few times. I was wider awake, afterward.

One night last week too I found, riding up Damen, that construction blocked my way. (Every time I ignore the detour signs until it is too late; usually a bike can pass where a car cannot, but not always.) Made to walk anyhow, I poked around the site a while, patted the bulldozer's metal-plated feet. The best thing about this, though, was the pit: taking up half the road, square and perhaps twenty feet deep? This number is almost certainly a little too high, but as an emotional distance it is about right. The rain that was falling joined a thick stream of water at the bottom which I perceived as only an occasional minnow-flash of light and a burbling sound. It may have been just the accumulation of the evening's downpour, but it sounded live and as if it were going somewhere.

(At the park by the river by my childhood home, the informational plaque headed THE BUBBLING UNDERGROUND STREAM never failed to produce a vernal thrill in me -- still does, just knowing it is there.)

In the presence of great heights or depths or moving powers I feel thoroughly scrubbed, as if by strong wind or Beethoven. On workdays I've been walking to a new grocery store to get my lunch, and one day taking a different route came across a rather shocking, barely-protected drop -- just the absence of a building that would have had to travel several stories up to reach street level.

Now: a daily transcript of the chatter of my inner radio might seem at first to reveal a weird abundance of death-related programming. But that's a facile reading. For example, take this drop, this slice of space as perfect and luscious as a piece of cake in a display case. A surge of desire came up in me to toss myself lightly over the rail. This was in one sense a motion toward death, but only inasmuch as death is a motion toward freedom. (It isn't actually, of course, but the false equivalence tugs mutely at the soul, grounded in or bolstered by our loveliest hymns.) One wants to have the experience of falling through the air, or being gripped by the waves that claw their way across the Lake Shore Path, or being met full-force by a large truck -- to come right up against the palm of God. But it is impossible to desire, if not straight out impossible, to have had such an experience. Any thought of after is a total corruption of the thing. So the mind stops at the logic-blind impulse that says: there, in darkness, in absence, you could do anything. It will not be tutored by the lesson of Kant's dove no matter how often reason sends it flapping through the brain.

Friction, though: that's what we have to work with. That is where we spend our days -- at the level of force produced by texture, not by some clean thrust of will or gravity. The fine-grained surfaces of the possible are not the impediment to the real motion of our lives; rather, they give it almost its entire character. Most of its itchiness, most of its prickliness, most of its velvet.