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Near the widest part of the railroad yards the tracks veered away from the thinning trees toward the water. The long strip of park devolved into a lumpy abandoned meadow. Beyond the field waited empty concrete parking-lots servicing motels and dingy restaurants stalked by drunk men in dirty ski jackets, who asked, but I didn't have any.
The street leading away from the open field was torn up and littered with construction sawhorses, but there was a lit-up liquor store about two blocks down. I had a few tiny nuggets of pot in my jacket, but still no pipe, and I thought, papers, maybe.
Filling the holes punched through the concrete dust were puddles swirled by the wind into thunderclouds of coffee, and I threaded around piles of boards and orange barrels flashing out warnings to nobody.
I saw through the doorway of the liquor store two Chicago cops in uniform leaning on the microwave counter, yapping with one of the two guys on the register about nothing in particular. These two guys looked bored enough to really fuck with somebody. So I floated past to ask the guy at the far register, only about eight feet away, quiet as I could, if he sold cigarette papers.
He looked blankly into my face. "What?"
Gritting my teeth, I asked, 'Do you sell Zig-Zags?' and he rattled off five different varieties without blinking. The cops were clearly in a different reality from this fellow, and I went with it.
'Give me the widest ones you have.'
He said, "I wish I had what you got."
'Do you get a cigarette break?'
"Nah, nah, I just had one."
'Oh well,' I said, starting to turn. 'See ya.'
He grinned at me.
I strolled out past the cops, past the orange barricades, past the dirty ski jackets, up to the highest ripple in the meadow, almost a hill, and rolled the world's clumsiest joint. I sealed my hands around the flame, and found the effort to ignition ratio perfectly acceptable. Ever conservation minded, I took a few good drags, maybe burning up a third of it, and folded the rest into my pocket.
Earlier, I'd been downtown, where an earnest black man had tried to fish me in off the sidewalk and save my immortal soul by pressing a yellow flier into my hand from a stack he was cradling against his jacket. Looking down at that collage of bad grammar and fear, I wanted to tell him to save the dingy people down the street from the cold wind and the earsplitting rumble of the elevated subway, but for some reason he didn't appear to see them. I told him, 'I don't think I can help you,' and I walked away before he could get wound up.
Only a couple blocks later I had found the museum of art, where I luckily stumbled upon the modern wing, rows of surreal images I'd never seen before, and I remember wanting to return sometime, altered. Hung near the front, the first Balthus painting I'd seen showed a little girl sitting cross-legged on a piano stool with her panties glowing white as toothpaste. I wondered, if this particular deviant didn't belong to the yacht club, his painting washed in the blood of dead presidents and all, would they hang it on the wall?
Soon my eyes pulled me over to a very pink face sprouting a skinny brown pigtail, '666' penciled above his nose, upside down crosses floating near his ears, his expression fractured. It could have been a self-portrait of the anarchist who'd painted it. I felt gratitude for the curator who'd put it up there, because it made me less lonely, because it was even uglier than I felt.
Nothing less than synchronicity tours incorporated itself had guided me to those strange paintings. I'd never been to Chicago before, I didn't even know that museum existed, and I had arrived on the one day a month the museum was free, and open until late. It was more than I could absorb, staring at deranged color and form until my thoughts were indistinguishable from the disoriented Picasso contortions. Leaving the surrealist hallway, I tried to go down a long, white curved staircase, but the security guard fondling the burgundy velvet rope told me they were closing, closing, closed.
I walked down the long stone steps channeling the wind to my ankles and face, and swung south through the park. What would happen to me? I had nowhere in mind, and no way to go there. My friends were somewhere learning about fish in gigantic tanks filled with simulated lake water suspended above simulated lake silt, and painted pedophile anarchists fading in my head.
In the center of the park a metal horse reared up off the ground underneath a metal rider. He must have killed a lot of people, I thought, to get his own statue here. I defiantly climbed up the cold legs of the horse, reaching up the saddle to the hero's jacket, but he just wouldn't be unseated, no matter how hard I dug my fingers into his icy steel hide.
From the meadow, the store, and the joint, and more for later. I drifted over the grass, across the curve of the highway back to the aquarium.
I found my friends' car along a tree-lined street bordering the lake, and I sat on the curb, waiting for the three of them. Mat had driven the two hours up the freeway to attend a lecture inside the aquarium. There was another event, a fund-raising dinner or something, going on at the same time as the lecture. I thought about the countless fish swimming around inside their tanks, and the endless row of expensive cars, and I thought about the people inside the aquarium who'd driven them here to pay for bigger tanks in which to store the captured fish.
Under the layers of burning orange streetlight and dark hidden branches, a man, maybe about forty, wearing a suave gray suit which bent gently around his elbows and knees, strode to the gray Jaguar I'd been staring at across the street. Following gingerly across the grass was a woman in a white dress which sparkled at the neck.
They were good-looking, and they didn't seem to have the slightest doubt about anything.
I envied their certainty, and I despised my jealousy of that certainty. After he opened and closed her door, he walked around the front of the car, and I called out to him, to see if he was real.
'Very nice.'
He called back, "What?"
I said, clearer, 'You have good taste.' I hadn't the faintest idea whether or not I thought that was true. I couldn't imagine ever driving that car, so I felt safe intruding on his world for that moment. By then he had his door open, stopping for a second to look at me.
"Thank you," he said, gently, almost wistfully, as though he'd never had anyone say that to him before, and rather wished it would happen more often.
As he started the car, he said something to his friend, and her smiling eye twinkled at me as the car pulled away.
My friends walked toward me out of the same pattern of shadows and once more I was stranded at the edge of the lake. I couldn't walk any further out, and still stay dry, anyway. Anyone who died was staying dead. Blessed are the poor and unfortunate, blessed are they, for they are the straight man, and the punch line, and so on, forever.
We all squeezed back into the car, perhaps only three hours after we'd climbed out of it, the streets began to move under us as the engine grew louder, and I watched a wide alien skyline shrink into blackness.
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