I’m cleaning out drafts, and this has been sitting for a couple of years. I scroll past it, but I’m not sure why. I think that I dislike talking about Chicago for a pile of reasons. Chicago is directly on my Pluto line, which fits because I had several severe, near-death experiences there and decades of trauma. But mostly, now it is truly somebody else’s life. It’s so far from me and who I am, it feels more like speaking about a character I studied. It’s something I lived through and something I survived. It’s a city full of traps, ghosts, and bruises.

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I met an older woman from Chicago. It doesn’t happen that often out here. I don’t know how it quite came up. She was talking about her struggles to see all Cubs games via Roku, so I knew our soft rift was coming—a forked divergence. I didn’t break it to her right away. It’s a specific dialect in split hairs based on the prejudices and proclivities of symbolic geography. 

She went into her history, of her Grandfather at WGN in the 30’s, Bozo, her Dad’s work with the McCaskeys, where she was on September 11. It’s a thing. She wanted what I have too, but mine’s just meager: the registrar at the Art Institute in the 20’s, being a sommelier at Jordan’s starred, fine dining space, some service staff at the Armour mansion, and 86ing a drunk, young Pritzker on Michigan Avenue.

I don’t share much. My people just survived. Some with airs and aspirations, a fading knowledge of old world stability, some without any at all except hunger and harm.

I got in mild trouble for 86ing that Pritzker, from the kind, but inauthentic boss who asked me out so gently and respectfully once and even though he was handsome, tall, and perceptive, I could tell he spent time binge drinking to try and ignore those deeper parts of him, and betraying his authenticity to fit in with groups that I doubt he actually wanted to fit in with. He surely sat in the bleachers at Cubs games with college friends who made women feel unsafe, his pressed khakis and button-ups to mask whatever he was really feeling inside. 

I didn’t want to be somebody’s way they figured themselves out. I was already too far working on the inside and dissecting my wounds for wisdom to spend time helping someone skirt around theirs. I was already the sharp knives version of me, all starving and edges to parse through what had happened with maximum perseveration and zero safe connection to my body. A smear of ether, defense, and sparks everywhere I went to make some sense of it. All reactivity and survival.

That was the same place the other manager cornered me in the back of the house, asking me why I wouldn’t go out with him while getting closer and closer until I couldn’t move except to shove past his arm hard with my left hip. I told that other nice, tall manager, who actually got it, and it never happened again. 

It was a funny place, in the heart of Gold Coast, where all sorts of notables would stay when they flew in for their appearances and talks. Lots of politicians and newscasters, and niche celebs. Beautiful high-end sex workers and jazz musicians between sets at nearby hotel lounges.

In that same place, the third manager (who was depressed, but real) and I talked about music, and he loaned me his Silver Mt Zion albums. He asked me out, too, but my policy was always the same – I don’t date people I work with, so that was that. And anyway, I was already getting ready to be done with being sad. It’s telling how many were drawn to me when I was all wounds, and the frenzy of alchemical and visceral work to fix them, the place where pain is distilled into the fuel for transformation.

There was a server named Christian who had eyes that showed he was pieces inside from having been raised in a cult that wasn’t kind to children. He spoke about it freely, and there was a peace I had when working with him because we could feel the reality of the other. He was at an age where he was processing—far enough away from the events, but not so far that he had found a way to live with it yet. By saying it, he was hearing his story hit air, and making sense of it based on reactions from others. I don’t know if he knew it, but we were all protective of him.

And I worked with a middle-aged man, a functioning drug user who managed his use well and always called me ‘fine-ass’ plus my first name, with a smile, which from him wasn’t gross but hilarious and somehow managed to be a genuine compliment. And his cousin, who was so nice, but managed his drug use far less well, so we all helped him out to make it through each night smoothly. The first one taught me that you can say anything you want as long as you smile while you’re saying it. 

That’s where I was working when the WTC was bombed. I had to go to work that day before planes were grounded because nobody could fly out, and the tall manager thought it would be busy. I went into the city, the only vehicle on Lake Shore going in, while every car was streaming out. That day, Stan Lee was dining because his flight was canceled, and one of the servers was thrilled, but it was hard to be excited because the news was of things actively collapsing. A server named Julia was in the bathroom, throwing up, waiting to hear from her family. Later when she moved away, I moved into her Pilsen apartment.

Once, when I was buying wine for another restaurant, I left for lunch and went to The Drake to meet my other manager, a man who looked like a comic book hero and used to be a pro volleyball player. We were buying wine at auction for the high-end MJ restaurant. MJ drinks extremely good left-bank Bordeaux. In those days, the manager drove out to MJ’s house to drop off cases of Bordeaux from the 60s, and in 90-degree weather, he’d be drinking glasses of 1st growths while he hit golf balls out on his driveway.

Once I hit his shoulder with a Billecart-Salmon Rosé cork, and he was really nice about it. Once, I accidentally poisoned his lawyer with shellfish during an anxiety attack. I was always starving then.

That day at the auction we sampled bottles from the 30s and 40s and then I ran back and delivered salads dotted with dates and cornbread croutons, rolled up some silverware in napkins, and walked out into the night for the long, unsafe walk up the beach past small parties and up-to-no-goods and solos contemplating things, to the maddening concrete apartment where there was nowhere to go but on to the page. 

In the conversation with the older lady, we get to the part where she’s asking where my people are from. It’s hard to explain quickly. I say my dad’s family is from the South Side, which isn’t true, but it’s a shorthand for Irish that she’ll understand, and easier than explaining the North Side Irish, and Dean O’Banion, and then the family’s eventual settling in the suburbs. It’s enough to differentiate us. It’s enough to let her know: Catholic and White Sox. And then I add: My Mom was born on the North Side and then grew up in Wheaton. That’s enough for her to know: Protestant, and to them, sports don’t matter much. Not in the same way.

The White Sox predictably shift her. But I judge her for the same thing she judges me. I don’t tell her I lived right by Wrigley for a while, and what a damn mess, and the menace those fans are. Most of those game attendees are drunk tourists and frat boys in bad sandals with toenail fungus and no shirts, puking and pissing on the streets all around the park. Not there for the baseball, but for publicly drinking around their glaring insecurities. 

Everybody is a Cubs fan; it’s work to be a Sox fan, which feels way more Chicago. Way more along the lines of: the Lager Beer Riot, Pullman Strike, and Haymarket Affair. You have to want it, and you have to be willing to pay for it. Way less: Out for a beer with a pack of blatantly undiagnosed menaces. But ultimately, what does it matter? It’s just a coded language waving in the air.

All of this is packed into a conversation I have in my head around her because there’s no way to make the discussion real, past geographic, verbal, symbolic stenotype. I could say: My grandma worked at the Maurice Lenell factory making Pinwheels and Jelly Stars. Her kitchen smelled like stale bread and cigarettes. All of my Great Aunts had dark shag basements with wood bars and pool tables, Catholic whiskey, and custom clay ashtrays made to fit their palms. In their living rooms, Wedgewood bric-a-brac. On Easter, orchids for the girls and mothers.

My mom’s dad was a printer making ads from lithography stones and retreating to the garage due to so much leftover shell shock and a wicked, undiagnosed wife behaving wickedly inside. His way to still love her was to let her be harmful. I come from many men who were dead cowards in relationships, afraid of their own emotional shadows. I come from women who had to be the men because of that. 

My grandfather hid and made stools, turned beautiful pedestals, and made a bird’s-eye maple dresser. He used melted toothbrush handles to make hinges, and airplane windows to make photo albums, all instead of rising in his life and self; a fear of discomfort, a fear of his own growth. Nearly everybody in that family was or is a frustrated maker and artist. Everybody was always hiding from whatever was harder to do—overdeveloped in one area, stunted and quaking in the other, and making those around them pay for it.

The older lady had a different experience from mine. She talks about spending time on their boat on the lake, their WGN box at Wrigley, and how she still gets a card from the McCaskeys at Christmas. I’m sure she never fainted in a cold drop outside the Music Box from a movie that made repressed and surfacing memories flood back into her body, and her first memories are not of sitting on laps of varying safety watching people play penny Pinochle in smoky kitchens well past bedtime, or cracking out the fine china and silver only twice a year dressed in velvet for an uncomfortable, ceremonial holiday skirting around brutal truths and watching permitted, simmering abuses unfold.

I don’t think she’s conscious of it all as we converse. She hasn’t had to be. She has never found herself at a random gala a friend had an extra ticket to, and then later changing her clothes under the clothes she was already wearing while on the El to go to her friend’s new band’s show with a midnight start at the filthy punk bar. She hasn’t lived high/low enough to know how to seamlessly be both, and when, and where.