[Logan Square]
"I thought you were supposed to be my wingman?"
(friend pauses)
"But this bar smells like a toilet."
[Bucktown]
"She's multitalented. I mean besides the being married part."
[East Village]
"Do you remember that girl who was passed out on the couch at the bridal shower? That was her. She has an eating disorder."
Everything changes as you get older and though much falls away much else clicks oddly into place: let me describe for you a town I have not come to figure out but maybe I can give a little history to. Though I grew up in the city of Chicago, my part-time home was actually the enigmatic Michigan City, Indiana. Note that the town is in Indiana and not Michigan. People get this confused.
I first met Michigan City when I was two. I do not remember this. I remember early pictures of me in a pink winter jacket breaking icicles off of the weird white wrought-iron furniture inherited with the house. I remember my parents deciding their new Chicago-person-weekend-place was suitable to cross-country skiing. I remember throwing up Burger Chef in the car when I was pretty small and there was still Burger Chef. I remember eating at Mr. Steak and Golden Bear and visiting the TV repair store numerous times and staring at the vacuum tubes.
Weekends were spent here every weekend and summers too, long drives along burnoffs and oil tanks and wastewater treatment, past the beaux arts train station in Gary, past roadside motels (were there tourists?) like Al & Sally's, like the now bombed-out looking one at the junction of US 12 and US 20 and the toll road about which I once overheard someone on the South Shore Line look at out the window and say, "What is this, fucking Beirut?"
I didn't appreciate it then and how could I; I was a kid and all my friends were having birthday parties with each other on the weekends, later they were going downtown to Water Tower Place or Marshall Field's to harass salesladies into giving them perfume samples or something. I felt I was missing out. I was being dropped off in a beachside town with a confused identity (it, not me, but maybe that too) and driven to the library on weekends to buy 10-cent used copies of Reader's Digest and check out Trixie Belden books and sit in yellow-lacquered-blue-carpeted-inside egg chairs and read and read until the time had passed. (Later, when I was older and allowed to be both more independent and more trashy, I would just get dropped off at the mall on the way into town and buy a copy of Soap Opera Digest and a cookie from the Mrs. Fields' knockoff in the food court, but soon my interest in complete garbage must've turned to boys, or sports, or something.)
There used to be a big grocery store out on 20 called Bernacchi's, it was more like a ramshackle giant tented farmer's market than the corporate Jewel Foods (still abandoned) in town and I clearly remember the meat maps; every now and then my mom and I would go and I'd be handed an enormous cookie at the checkout counter, something I in my childhood thought was a magical prize associated specifically with making it through that huge grocery store. I thought it was from the grocery store as a gift. This possibly explains my misguided view of the world's generosity to this day.
Other free things procured in town were lollipops, anytime I was dragged along to the liquor store. This was a feature of booze shops in Chicago as well, but they were especially forthcoming with the Spangler's Dum-Dums lollipops at both the Michigan City Liquors store (next to where my mom and I once saw a guy get hit by a car) and at the later-established, more upscale (for Indiana) King Richard's. Seriously, if you bring your kid into the liquor store with you they get a free lollipop. Nice positive associations, you weird drug pusher storekeepers you.
Until the late '80s Michigan City's pleasures were limited (to my knowledge) strictly to Marquette Mall and the beach. Marquette Mall is now a dead mall, and the beach is as wonderful as ever. Coastal people occasionally engage in debate over whether the Great Lakes really have legitimate beaches. They can go shove it — my beach is the best one I've ever been to and there's no nasty saltwater either.
At some point the semi-lost-soul-Hoosier/part-time-Chicagoan town decided a bit of economic stimulation was needed, so they accepted a bid for one of the country's first outlet malls to be built over by the NIPSCO plant (not a "nuke-ular" plant, though it looks the same as one) and the Jaymar Ruby Sans-a-Belt slacks factory. The outlet mall boasted startling new brand names the likes of which 46360 had never seen before, like Benneton. City folk made Michigan City more of a destination and the mall back by the highway started to fail. Soon the novelty gift store, the creepy hidden video arcade, the Claire's Boutiques, B. Dalton, and the corn dog stand would all be gone. Today the anchor stores are still there (Sears, Carson Pirie-Scott, and JC Penney's) but the bulk of Marquette Mall is abandoned save for an oversized Hallmark shop, a 365-days-a-year Christmas store, and a couple of cell phone stands. I tried to buy shoelaces there this past weekend, just to see if I could, and despite the two or three extant shoe stores, I had to go across the parking lot to Walgreen's. Walgreens used to be inside the mall but moved outside to a detached space more convenient to passing car traffic, and only a few steps across the road from the liquor store that used to be Pizza Hut and also sells drum equipment.
I had my first swim lessons and my first positive day camp experiences at the Michigan City YMCA down on Coolspring. I was in Polliwogs or Guppies or Silverfish or whatever and have been, as a result of this place, a swimmer my whole life. I also had a gymnastics class here where the instructor, no doubt fourteen though I'm sure I thought she was ancient, was so mad at me once she insisted smoke would come out of her ears. I was terrified. I had a swim at the Michigan City Y just last year and I don't think the locker room had been updated or even cleaned since I was a Polliwog. The pool was fairly disgusting too. Yesterday they had their YMCA charter revoked.
It was in high school, aided by the acquisition of a driver's license and also a growing pinball habit, that I started exploring the town in earnest. I found the bad neighborhoods of Michigan City — sketchy video arcades on Michigan Avenue and abandoned gas stations out on the west side of town, all kinds of places I had never seen while shuttling with my parents from the old McDonald's to the place you could rent VHS tapes and the VCRs to watch them on (or, hey, laserdiscs!) in the back of the stereo store by K-Mart. The General Cinemas 1-6 was also a popular spot for me, except for the time I got dropped off there without money and was too scared to cross the busy intersection of US 421 and US 20 to get to the mall and kill the next 90 minutes til my parents came back to pick me up.
In more recent years the city took another stab at economic development by deciding to allow a casino. A casino! According to state law this had to be an offshore enterprise, meaning, a boat, meaning, they were going to have to build a ship in Trail Creek. A casino riverboat was built, nothing seaworthy, but it can sail out a few feet away from the dock once every hour and stay legal with the feds. I went out to it once, played maybe one slot machine, and ran back ashore before I was trapped in the creek for an hour.
The casino is so "successful" that it has displaced many of the poorer people's homes and allowed for the creation of a four-story parking garage, something I never thought we'd need in Michigan City. They have also expanded the riverboat by building a larger structure around the existing boat, kind of like when you fix your pool by pouring another layer of concrete inside it. More and more unexplained and hideous construction happens on it all the time.
A million other things happened and disappeared here too: Fried's Cat Shelter, whose name became more than ironic when the entire thing was destroyed by fire, the Franklin Pharmacy whose animated neon mortar-and-pestle are now echoed bizarrely in the modern logo of the newly erected Walgreens across the street, the crazy-arc architecture of Al's Grocery Store that became Frank's Nursery and Crafts that became Goodwill that became, I think, abandoned, the hobbit-renovated brick brewery on 8th street that nature has nearly fully reclaimed, the strip mall that came and went at Lake Shore Drive and Lake, the Hot'n'Now burger drive-thru that is now a delicious low-rent Mexican joint.
Wherefore art thou, weird old timey Michigan City? Not to worry, the world's most angularly modern library is still thriving, the creepy observation tower still looms atop the depressing zoo, the dunes still roll even in the shadows of teetering apartment developments, and yes, most importantly, the electric trains from Chicago still go right down the middle of the street.
A couple years ago friends of mine started moving towards Michigan City, which completely confused me and changed the landscape from one of isolation and escape (and, occasionally, being trapped) to one into which my adult life, my social and musical world, had leaked bizarrely over. Really? You guys live up the road a piece and stop at the new Meijer by the highway on your way into town? And Joe — who has salvaged telltale yellow castoff shelves from that hypermodern library I spent most of my youth in, and stocked them with actual good books and magazines I doubt anyone else in the entire town is in possession of — he and those shelves now inexplicably lives just a short winter's wander from my parents' place, a much cozier place to end up on, say, New Year's or many other other eves, rather than in the big city. (You can walk down the main street of our neighborhood if you like, or you can also walk home via the beach. If you have never had a friend whose house you could walk home from in the middle of the night via the beach, let me tell you — you are really missing out.)
I can't imagine what will happen to this place, this strange commercial failure with sand in its shoes, revitalized and pillaged both by the serpentine stream of Illinois license plates that imbue it with cash and deplete it of long-term character. The changing commercial landscape is novelty and America both: it falls apart in ways that maybe it should, but that are also saddening in that now-every-viable-business-is-an-IHOP-by-the-interstate kind of way. (Tres Indiana.) And yes, I'm a nostalgic fool, but wouldn't you be if you grew up in fractional summers by the hot wind blowing in the dune grass, just down the beach from monkey island?
In October 1995 a Canadian guy by the name of Scott Rumble stopped me from punching out a really annoying girl at a Guided By Voices show in London, Ontario. (Her, throwing elbows and hair; her friend, throwing herself inexplicably at guitarist Mitch Mitchell.) Three years later I'd take him up on his offer to crash at his four-square apartment in Burlington, the city where my grandfather died: I distinctly remember crossing the border at Port Huron in a slate-grey fall, and driving round a twilight bend on the 403 near Waterdown where I pulled over and told Scott I was nearby.
"We'll put some tea on for you," he said. I was moving to Canada and I really had no idea what I was doing.
1. spring
I always forget about spring. Seriously, it's like you need to suspsend your belief in it during winter, because if you really knew, if you really remembered, it'd be completely torturous during the worst bleakest greyest sleetiest days of winter decline and despair. (It's kind of the same as forgetting that there is love in the world, maybe — some days you just can't handle that idea.) In any case I don't know what the deal is with people who live in places without seasons — that cyclical mind game of forgetting and remembering (over and over your whole entire life) anchors the most inspiring and awakening and beautiful stuff in the world for me. I heard the ice cream truck yesterday, for god's sake. Life is good.
2. arcane culinary geographical reference
Can I just say how much pleasure I take in coming off like some kind of old crank in a roadside bar whenever someone tells me where they're from in the good ol' United States? "Oh yeah? You're from Albuquerque? Sure could use me one of those grilled cinnamon rolls from down at the Frontier Restaurant!" Hopefully it's not too annoying, but I dearly love to be the local nutjob and random food go-to in any travel conversation. Of course, my knowledge is pretty obscure and limited to the 50 states and only a handful of Canadian provinces — but for now I can be content with wandering into a Brooklyn coffee shop and droppin' some serious hometown taco and brunch-spot science on the transplanted baristas. Speaking of which, can somebody hook me up with a Montreal cannoli or a shot of Blue Bottle Roman espresso? Thanks!
We start with an empty stage in a circus hall in Little India. There are blue lights and on the synthesizers is a single red rose; on the floor have fallen three petals. Fallen or been placed. Fallen or been placed.
So, Jandek comes out. Jandek wears a suitcoat. Jandek takes off the suitcoat, folds. Drummer sits on floor. Guitarist takes off shoes, socks. Why wear them onstage to begin with? It's dark and blue and gravely silent. Like they have stumbled upon a beautiful fragile animal that they don't want to scare away, no one moves, no one crinkles anything, no one's phone even goes off. (robots in disguise / small fleet of sparrows) But it is not all good, it is not all palatable, most of the time, in fact, I do not find it at all palatable, but I wait and watch. I thought, maybe, for some reason, things were going to rage. Things were going to break apart, like the breaking apart of secrets or of the slience that was mostly vocal squall and sometimes wiggling whirr. No shoes guy is amazing. Sitting guy is occasionally perfect. Most of the time things seem particularly unexperimental, other than playing with things that look like chopsticks, skewers, tobacco tins, a drinking straw. But mostly there is a wish for breaking (and respite), and then there is truly a moment, after nearly two hours, and it is not a long one, but I am with them, with the chopstick guy and the percussionist who has rattled and rattled and made eye contact and knocked down the chimes, and you want to listen to the clanging and steal the densely scrawled lyric notebook (pure gold! fandom! poetry! eBay!) and maybe you'd rather even do that than be here, but it's all so tenuous and you just kind of keep hoping.
And then Jandek picks up his suitcoat and his little clock and walks away and you ride home on a streetcar full of Jandek fans (world's most unlikely occurrence) and think, man, that was totally weird, and and you wonder if we were being goaded, how many of us took the bait, have always taken the bait, took the rose petals, and fell for it.
Do we really only see the things we are looking for?
For awhile yesterday I was thinking that the dictionary was psychically posessed — how is it that it manages to fall open to exactly the words I was trying to remember the meanings or names of, when there are so very, very many words in it? In just a couple of hours I accidentally flipped past the name of an abolitionist whose deeds I had forgotten (Wilberforce) and the name of a medication whose name I had been trying to remember daily for a few weeks (Chlorpromazine).
But I'm starting to become, well, either very suspicious of coincidence, or deeply worried about how much my conscious is ignoring 95% of the time. Today I was talking to Andrea about coincidence — in fact, talking to her about a time I was talking to Lara about coincidences involving one specific person and then we ran into that person in the middle of the conversation. In a city of 8 million people.
Naturally if you're talking about coincidence at all and then you have one it's extra creepy, but then I dropped Andrea off and went on my merry way. I should mention at this point that at some stage of my trip home from New York I got it in my head I wanted one of those shower caddies that stands in the corner of your tub enclosure, floor to ceiling, with a few wedge-shaped shelves. In fact, I had almost gone to the organizing store in the mall that very morning to look for one, but couldn't decide whether to do that or go look at CDs, and Andrea told me I should just go home.
But I decided to go look at CDs, and between dropping Andrea off and reaching the CD store... was one of those shower caddies that stands in the corner of your tub enclosure. In the park. The PARK! Standing up against a tree. So I put it in my car and went to the CD store. (Where I saw, but didn't buy, a CD by the band of a guy I worked with once whose name I had been trying to remember that morning...)
Either I control the universe, or I am missing out on a lot of information.