This is the beginning of the first chapter of Part III:
YSEBART
21
I
lit my first cigarette and watched a small kid
Cussin’
at a can he was kickin’
Then
I crossed the empty street
and
caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken
And
it took me back to something
That
I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way
-
Kris Kristofferson, “Sunday Morning Coming Down”
We
lived in a four bedroom loft apartment on the top floor of a ten
story apartment building, directly beneath the fifty-foot golden
clock tower perched atop the building, which lit up Greektown and the
Near West side like an Athenian full moon. If I felt out of place
amongst the yuppie crowd in the lecture halls and library aisles of
my law school downtown, things aren’t much better in my home
neighborhood of Greektown, where I am an Irishmen in search of
whiskey and sports on streets that were lined only with classical
architectural columns and statutes of Greek gods, where the
storefronts are adorned with Christian relics, homemade wax candles,
wines and cheeses, where the streets are lit up with the neon lights
spelling out “Greek Islands,” “Artopolis,” “Rodity’s,”
“Pegasus Restaurant and Tavern,” “Santorini” and “The
Parthenon,” out of place among the old men and women in wool caps
waiting at the bus stops and the thirty-something parents pushing
newborns in strollers. I don't even like fucking gyros. Some dozen miles away, I might have found home
in the tree-lined streets of Wrigleyville or Lincoln Park, where
young college students and post-grads like myself guzzled beers on
the front porches of townhouses and in the windows of Chicago’s
corner bars and pubs while searching for their way in the world, but
since I was in Petoskey all summer I left the apartment search in the
hands of my roommate Ryan, the Naperville native; I didn’t give
Chicago the forethought I should have, in retrospect. The only place
I feel any semblance of home in Chicago is up in the tenth floor
window of our apartment skyrise beneath the clock tower, listening to
Red Wings play by play announcer Ken Kal narrate another winter night
in Chicago for me through my headphones, a tall glass of whiskey soda
at my side, but even there, I’m usually alone; I would often get up
at whistle breaks and intermissions, to look out the living room
window into the Chicago night, the skyline bedazzled with glimmers of
red and white lights in the Sears Tower and other skyscrapers -- great Chicago, where
my classmates and roommates are out beginning the rest of their lives, and I’m amazed that in a
city so immense I could feel so utterly alone.
Most
mornings, I take for granted the view of the sun rising from the East
over the cityscape; its appeal had quickly been lost on account of the blinding light it greeted me with every morning at six a.m.. But something
in the whiskey beckoned me towards the apartment windows at night
time. It was all there at my fingertips, the vast skyline domineered
by the geometric angles of the skyscrapers, reaching
for stars mired by smog;
the steeple-topped churches humbly genuflecting at the feet of the
steel skyscrapers; the factory chimneys waving endless
handkerchiefs
of smoke into the frostbitten air; and behind it all lurked the
mysterious
enormity
of Lake Michigan frozen over, where icebergs squeezed forwards
towards Lakeshore Drive, hoping to climb ashore and rest their weary
masses; even
further out
on the edge
horizon lurk
the deepest depths of Lake Michigan, where the souls of sailors lost
to the Great Lakes are frozen in debaucherous howls in the ship
graveyards at the cavernous bottoms of the lake.
The slow march of life and death exists outside my window, but I am
stuck inside that tenth floor apartment, alone
in a room with a guy that I judge worse than anyone else, stuck
in the past.
