Ch. 17: Hull

HULL

17

Chicago for me would turn gray, cold, impersonal, cruel. But in the beginning, when I was still in college, it was summertime in the Windy City, and it was very much vast and limitless. Opportunity not yet squandered. Opportunity not yet lost to the bottom of a bottle.

There’s an intern party going on in one of the dorm rooms at the University of Illinois – Chicago campus, where my fellow interns and I are staying for the duration of the Chicago-Kent Law School summer internship program, and I’m sneaking away from the party room back to my own dorm room, where I giddily line up two fresh lines of Adderall to snort off of my wooden desk, which looks out from a brick dormitory tower window to the corner of Halsted and Harrison, where the Sears Tower looms majestically above the steel skyline of great Chicago and the shores of Lake Michigan, the city lights beginning to glimmer in the falling dusk, the sun setting over the redbrick rooftops and steeple towers of Chicago. I snort both lines back to back, one for each nostril. The adderall immediately gives my veins a jolt of electricity and I pump my fists in the air like a boxer before a title fight, amping myself up for Game 7 of the 2009 Stanley Cup Finals, a rematch of last year’s final pitting my defending champion Detroit Red Wings and the young guns of the Pittsburgh Penguins. A game seven in the Stanley Cup Finals. Doesn't get any bigger than this. Don't get scared now.

Strange as it is to be away from Detroit and Ann Arbor for Game 7 -- makes me uncomfortable in my superstition -- the whiskey and adderall alleviate the nerves and make me feel right at home. On whiskey and amphetamines Chicago seems very much conquerable.