Ah, Chicago

Last night I went with Laura to see Megan do a reading at Webster’s Wine Bar which like everything in this city except for poverty and government malfeasance and bottled-up culture is up on the North Side. It was snowing and we drove and we got there early because I had thought the traffic from the Bears game might have spread to 90/94 but it hadn’t.

I guess I had this image of people rushing the streets because they won and the Bears really haven’t won in a while. But, first, it’s hard for people to rush the interstate, and second, all the people that I know who are diehard bears fans are from way out in the burbs, ‘cause that’s where the people who have the time and energy to care about football and the lack of haughtiness to admit they care about football live. Anyway, the streets here are so wide there wouldn’t be a problem even a mob had developed.

I remembered when Laura, and Zoe (that was the first time I met her) and a bunch of other social-justicey people marched in the pro-immigrant (notice, not pro-immigration, pro-immigrant) march that took up a whole bunch of the city, and there were tons of people, and in some parts we weren’t marching, like we weren’t doing that conga-line walk you do when you’re in a real crowded party, but were actually walking, and you could even run if you wanted to, because the streets were so wide.

In Paris, after ’68 and the chaos, they widened a bunch of the streets, and Napoleon did it too before that, to make it easier to deal with revolutions.

It’s moments like those that I miss Boston, I miss the enclosedness and the crampedness. The narrowness. Yeah, sure it’s a pain in the ass to drive in, and I’ve yelled my share of four-letter words while sitting in Boston traffic with people cutting you off and cabs being cabs, with my windows up so no one could really hear me, but still I yelled and banged the steering wheel with my fist until it hurt. But that just makes you walk, and cities are meant to be walked in. Fuck cars. Here, you can drive everywhere, you just can’t park.

Thinking about this, and reading my journal from last summer, I remember a sort of, verse I guess, a paragraph I wrote that I, like most things of mine, at once like and hate:

I do not love the perfect places, boredom citified. No! Give me narrow streets, with daring daredevils upon them. Give me Roxburies, and accented accentuated Dawchestuhs. Give me squeaky trains screeching in the dark. I’ll take my commons to graze on and rebel in, and you can keep the Park. I want brick! Red! Red brick with golden domes built to top the hills.

I do not love the perfect places. Give me tragic teams (though I’ll take victories betimes). I must have grit, dust to seed the clouds. For a snowless world has nothing in it for me.

Ok, that wasn’t about Chicago, but about New York, as you can probably tell. And in some ways Chicago is like Boston, with the Cubs, and the Irish, and the corruption. But I cannot move past the age, or rather the youth, of Chicago.

It reminds me of that kid in my Spanish class who is from Romania and is, what, 18? Maybe, if that, but he acts like he’s 10, not in a bad way, but in an innocent way. He’s the guy who always answers the teacher’s questions before she’s done asking them and raises his hand, when he does raise his hand, raises his hand with an enthusiasm and pure purpose and straining for attention.

And so, like Chicago, whose streets are young but whose buildings for the most part are just as old and young as most of those in Boston and New York and Philly, he looks old but at heart he is simple and young. And that’s the annoying part.

And Chicago is like it is because it’s here in the Midwest next to a huge lake it pretends is like an ocean and a river that is so paltry that they could actually reverse the direction of it (although the Charles isn’t that much grander), and all the lands flat so of course the streets are flat and straight and there’s just so much land anyway, every acre as good as the next acre so you can afford to have big wide streets and everything is built in the weird era between when cities were almost exclusively for walking except for the few who could afford horses, which was, like, most of human history, think Troy, and the period when everyone had cars, think LA, and so it has a real downtown-centered development but also has straightness and regularity.

It’s not the city’s fault, then, that it is this way, I know. Anymore than it’s the kid in my Spanish class’s fault, because I think a lot of his naiveté comes from him being a foreigner, like he didn’t know what Hanukah/Channuka/Chanukkah/ChaaaanuUuKahH/Whatever was because, why should he? All the Jews left Romania.

But while I like that kid, he’s a good kid, I don’t want to live with him, or really hang out with him even. In Chicago they manage to be both jaded and cheery, and I just want the jaded. Because Chicago is jaded from Daley, and the politics of the prairie that once ruled here, with downstate and such. But Boston is jaded from something else, something more ethereal, less political. I can’t quite place my finger on it though.

Maybe it’s the traffic.