I miss stoops. My family moved to the near-west suburbs of Chicago when I was in kindergarten, finding a split-level house only a couple blocks from the city limits. Before we retreated to the boring, safe streets of River Forest though, we lived in Wrigleyville, that section of Chicago that surrounds the Home of the Cubs. Sitting on the stoop with my family during the summer, my hands slowly congealing to popsicle sticks or chocolate bars, we could gauge homeruns by the roar of the crowd as it reached us from a block away. During the seventh inning stretch, Harry Caray’s voice would carom over the houses and apartment buildings to tell us how many strikes it took in the old ball game.
Mark Grace played first base lankily back then, proving to me that my build had a chance in the major leagues. Sammy Sosa hadn’t turned to syringes yet, Ryne Sandburg was still flipping double-plays, and Shawon Dunston wore prescription glasses with hinged shades, flicking them down casually before chasing a fly ball. I’ve always had perfect vision, but that didn’t stop me from imitating that flick every time the tennis ball popped off my neighbor’s wiffle bat in our front yard.
Wrigleyville is a funny place. It’s only a couple miles north of the Loop, the heart of Chicago, but it’s relatively quaint – families proliferate among the picturesque flats, raising kids almost as though it were a suburb. We had backyards with swing sets and basketball hoops in the alley behind them. So I could stick out my tongue during the day, trying to make that Michael Jordan fade-away jumper even though the ball was bigger than my torso, but I had to come in at dusk. Once the sun set, there might be a different kind of jumper in the alley, one who had fists and maybe a knife, and had been known to jump kids just for their red-and-white Jordans. Occasionally a car got stolen, but more often only its radio. Some learned to carry a transistor in the car, leaving the tape deck empty.
*
Those first five years of life were my introduction to Chicago, the place I consider home, the city I want to raise my kids in, the town I feel inseparable from. When my girlfriend – originally from Colorado – was looking for an apartment on the north side, I sent her one of my favorite poems, an urban battle-cry by Carl Sandburg, telling her she couldn’t live there unless she’d read it. Describing an early twentieth-century Chicago, he wrote,
Hog Butcher for the
World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's
Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big
Shoulders…
The city doesn’t reek anymore from the slaughterhouses and stockyards of the south side – though that area remains less desirable – but Sandburg’s description still rings true. I have much of this poem memorized, mostly because the percussive words pound like black boots on pavement if you say them right. They go particularly well with the dotted eighth-note rhythm of the el – the elevated public train that connects almost every neighborhood to the loop.
I sit on the green line and feel the steady rocking of the ever-more-dilapidated cars, ka-chunk…ka-chunk…ka-chunk, lulling, preternatural and encompassing, like hearing your mother’s heartbeat from the womb. It’s a dying system, delays racking up under the stress of decades and growing populations, but I normally don’t mind the pauses, the waits for signal clearance. They force you to take in the reality of the west side – if you’re on the green line – a no-man’s land of the struggling lower-middle class. Gangs run this section, operating drug dens in abandoned apartment buildings that make McDonald’s look slow. I watch fifteen-year-old Men trudge the alleys, looking for trouble whether they want it or not, stormy, husky, brawling, heads high, chests out, trying to make their shoulders big enough for the history they’ve got to carry.
*
The train picks up again and carries me further east; I see the United Center where Michael Jordan used to wield a basketball like a trumpet, a scalpel, a paintbrush. There was only One Basketball Team in the Midwest back then, named for the animal that made the city stink, but also brought revenues that blossomed skyscrapers. If you don’t believe Michael Jordan was a magician on the basketball court, consider it a little more thoroughly. He made every white, crew-cutted, freshly-ironed, suburban kid dream of being bald and Black. Twice I convinced my mom to buy me brand new Jordans, once in first grade, and once in high school. Both times it was a great decision, and both times it took me longer to put on my shoes than it did to eat breakfast. They always had Velcro straps, magnetic buttons, or some strange plastic apparatus designed to make you better. Specifically, to make you dunk from the free-throw line, reverse lay-up between two defenders, hit a fade-away jumper with some poor Cavalier’s hand on your elbow for the extra point, blow past John Starks, and yes-oh-yes, Jam All Over Patrick Ewing.
Out on the playground, we liked to discuss what we imagined we had just done to the opponent: “Ooohhh it hurts, it hurts! I hope your girlfriend isn’t here because that was all in your face, ooohhh you better hope I don’t get hot I’ll hit so many jumpers in your eye you’ll go blind; boom, baby, it hurts, don’t it!” It still makes me laugh; scrawny, priviliged, white kids imitating things we’d heard from particularly zealous crowd members at home games. I successfully campaigned for a basketball hoop in our driveway and faced imaginary opponents on it for hours every night, even in the winter. I used to shovel the driveway and try to shoot with gloves on. My brother tutored me on spin-moves; “You’ve gotta fake with your head, like this,” he’d say, jerking his chin in the opposite direction of where he wanted to go, “and then pivot quick, keep the ball protected. If the ref’s not looking, put your elbow in the guy’s back like Mike, or try to get your heel behind his. It’s all about getting the step – you gotta be quick.”
I was quick with wisecracks, but not so much with basketballs, and I got cut three years in a row: seventh grade, eighth grade, and freshman year of high school. With too many dreams and not enough talent, I hung up my Jordans after the third rejection. Now, at nineteen, I still try to hoop at the fitness center sometimes, secretly hearing the announcer in my head tell me I’m from North Carolina, I’m the head guard, and I’m six-six, shouting mynamehisname to the fans…
*
When the train pushes closer to the river, poverty goes underground and the highrises begin. These are the buildings with Big Shoulders, reflecting communally like Senators basking in each others’ power. These are the buildings in which Things Happen.
Below on the avenues, a certain metallic cacophony rises, all shapes and forms of People Moving: going, coming, running, dawdling, laughing, sobbing, looking stern, hailing a taxi, asking for change, catching another’s eye for a second and then disappearing. At this point I get off the train or transfer to another line; this is the hub, the Loop, the center. There’s not much to say about it, because you only understand when you’ve been Here, when you’ve descended the el stairs to street level, the bottom of an urban canyon, and closed your eyes for a second, felt the Wind pull you towards the river like a magnet, ruffling your hair, making your eyes water, stealing part of your identity and giving it to The City.
