Chicago Song

A letter from a former life

Photo c. Michael Edmonds. NYC, 2023.

Listen to the post here…

The first time I went to New York—

which its inhabitants refer to as The City, as if it is the only city, the one that matters, the idea of city upon which all cities are based and from which source all cities derive, the Platonic form City, the city itself—I sat in the back of a taxi as it drove up whatever clogged arterial channel and looked out the window at a city bigger than the one I was from or the ones where I’d lived and found it eerily peaceful.

And cities did feel peaceful to me, back then. There was something to the din, the racket, the hum of it that felt familiar; it felt like the chaos and clatter of my own interior landscape had somehow gotten out and was reeling up and taking shape before my eyes. I felt pleasantly invisible; I felt like it might be possible to step into the current of it all, be swept away, disappear.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what changed—me or cities or both. There is still so much I love about cities; most of the people I love are in them, for one thing, and the art, the museums and music and theater and film, the cafes and the subways, the front stoops and the fire escapes, the way lit-up marquees throw streamers of neon out over the sidewalks, the way the ambient light in the sky never dims. I will never be able to quit cities, not fully, nor do I want to; there is too much humanity, too many kinds of beauty there.

But I can’t stay very long anymore. As soon as I arrive, crossing some kind of threshold between what the city keeps out and what it keeps in, I catch myself holding my breath, jaw locked, body braced, ready to run. It feels claustrophobic, now, noisy and cluttered, airless and skyless, too concrete and the clang of metal grates, too screaming sirens and broken glass, too pressing, too close.

I suppose I think about cities the way happily partnered people still think of younger loves who did them no wrong; their paths just parted ways. The city hid me when I needed its shadows; when I didn’t know the path forward, it lit the way. The city threw its neon boa over my shoulders, fixed my lipstick when I’d smudged it, said ‘Tits up, honey, you got this,’ and dragged me back onto the floor. At some point, though, the city needed me to be someone I couldn’t be; and I wanted to go places the city didn’t want to go. I still love the city; the city did me no harm. When we catch each other’s eyes in passing, at parties, I admit there’s still a spark. We both smile; we both turn away.

I’ll touch on the subject of cities more in future posts. This week, I want to share a piece—in both text and audio form—I wrote years ago. Who knows how or when we know what we know. This feels somehow like a letter I wrote to all of you, and maybe to me, even back then.

xoM

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Chicago Song

Passers-by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in the clutch of a hope,
Lips written over with strivings,
Mouths that kiss only for love,
Records of great wishes slept with,
Held long
And prayed and toiled for:

Yes,
Written on
Your mouths
And your throats
I read them
When you passed by.

—Carl Sandberg, “Chicago Poems”

Years ago, L. said plaintively, “Why can’t I just live alone and read and take a lover now and then?”

It’s a reasonable question; it doesn’t sound so bad, has a somewhat grim appeal, but an appeal nonetheless; you can feel the reading chair wrap around you like a lover as you sink back into its arms, curl your feet up under you, watch your cats pace back and forth along the mantle and the windowsill that lets in the gun-colored glint and flash of a New York City night, at least that’s what you’d see if you were her; she’d live in New York, and all her lovers would be New York lovers or brilliant sullen expats from Paris and Prague, she’d meet them at a party where they would be leaning on a wall with a drink dangling from their world-weary hand, or sitting low-slung on an uncomfortable modern chair, and L. would appear before them, an apparition, an angel, and they’d fall violently in love immediately, overcome by her beauty and ferocity and the sheer force of her impact on objects around her, and they would toss and turn in their thin ratty rarely-washed sheets all night, drifting in and out of dreams of L., getting up finally to stare out at the lonely ambient neon New York night, and fling themselves helplessly at their laptops, bang out tortured, tongue-tied letters in excruciatingly beautiful English peppered with French or Czech when the English language, as it so often does, abjectly failed, and L. would take them as lovers, and then—some five months or days or the occasional year later—they would of course turn out to be crazy, impossible drunks, and she would have to dispense with them somehow, shake herself free of them, retreat to her cloister of books, look out on the gunflint gleam of the New York night, and read, and take a lover now and then.

It would be different for me, if I lived alone and read and took a lover now and then. I would stare out the window at the water and the woods. I would steer clear of New York and New York lovers and sparkly people of any kind. When I was young and entropic, New York seemed peaceful, somehow, in a way I could not explain, in the way all cities seemed peaceful to me then, the hum of hive mind around me, a sea of bodies surging as one body, up and back with the regular rhythm of tides, and the Doppler scream of sirens going by. The smell of New York in the summer: human piss and hot trash. The Norman Rockwell beauty of December at Rockefeller Place with the ice skaters and shoppers with packages, scarves and hair speckled with snow. Kissing near-strangers in Central Park, under the oaks, by the boathouse, under the bridge. The time I got a deal at the Waldorf Towers and left a key for someone at the desk so she could get past the hushed marble and lily-filled lobby and into the secret elevators, and in the morning I packed while she slept, face down, incredibly lovely, I did not want to leave, but could not stay. New York by then was too much, too much, not peaceful at all, merely lonely and drab.

She asked me in a letter, But don’t you get lonely? I did not know how to answer that. I sat holding her letter, looking out at the water and the woods and tried to think. I don’t know if I get lonely. What is lonely? I have never been lonely. I have been lonely all of my life. I like being alone. But sometimes, aren’t you really and truly lonely, when you are alone? she asked. I said something middling and mediocre about balance, liking the balance of solitude and companionship, both of which provide solace and comfort, just of different kinds. I said, It’s possible I need both.

She said that before she accused me of leaving. She said, in a letter, after I’d left, You left. And though it seemed untrue, and I insisted that I hadn’t left, the simple fact was that I left, and I do not know why I did not notice I was leaving at the time.

If I were to live alone and read and take a lover now and then, there would be evenings to grapple with, of course. The evenings in Chicago were the worst. It’s interesting how memory, looking back, twists things until they’re lovely, like scrap metal under a blowtorch. I have twisted Chicago into the rainbow smog of summer evenings, after the street fairs have died down, after the farmer’s markets, after the rattle of the rush hour trains, after the coffee shop on the corner has closed and the bars in Andersonville are swarming with bodies sweaty in the Midwestern city heat, and I have nowhere to go but home to my rented rooms with the large armchair where I sat and the narrow bed where I lay in the very slight wind of the plastic dollar store fan, when my downstairs neighbor Antoine cranked the bass so loud the floor and walls shook, and if I’d bothered to put anything on the walls it would have fallen, but I didn’t hang a thing—why would I? I never intended to stay. Summer’s smoggy red and orange sunsets bled into fall and I lay on my side with my face to the open window, watching the alley cats pace in the courtyard below.

I read Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems while I was lying there in the heat and burnt tar smell of summer and then the heat and leaf-musk smell of early fall. It fascinated me that a city could have such a sense of itself, a sense of its own solidity, the City of Big Shoulders, the great blue-green lake and the lights of the ferris wheel and carousel out on Navy Pier. Nothing about Chicago is pretty—it is bigger than that, bigger than the word pretty implies. Central Park is pretty. The Met is pretty, big as it is. The people in New York are very pretty, disturbingly so. Chicago, though, is massive, hulking, it is soot, grit, the smell of food, the daily churn of newspapers, murder, crime.  Its jazz is more blues than jazz; nothing abstract about it, nothing atonal or out of time. It is the steady clang of metal striking metal, the rhythm of the rumble of the city laid deep below the concrete, below the underground tunnels, below the crust of the earth itself, the guttural heave of Chicago ripples down to the earth’s red core.

I ran into Antoine only twice, save the occasional pass and nod on the stairs that smelled of cat piss and pot smoke, which seeped into my apartment along with the smells of cooking, always the same smells—chicken fat frying, cumin, hot peppers, fish. Antoine was young and shy and handsome, with beautiful dreadlocks that reached his waist. How long have you had those? I asked him, sitting on the curb outside of the laundromat on a hot day. He smiled, shy, hands in pockets, looking away. Awhile, he said. I shaded my eyes from the flat sharp afternoon sun. I have a friend, I said, who’s been growing his dreads for nearly 30 years, and they look as ratty and decrepit as they did when he first rubbed his head with honey when he was 17. No matter what he does, at the end of the day he’s still a white boy with dreads.

Antoine laughed so hard he doubled over. It wasn’t that funny, but his face lit up when he laughed, as if he had seen no joy in years and now, without warning, here it was. Here was Antoine, laughing on a sweltering day in the blinding sun in the parking lot of laundromat in the gusts of dryer-sheet smelling wind. Why did I know his name? Why do I remember it? I remember no one else’s name from Chicago. I blew in off the lake and tumbled through town like a weed, tumbled right out the other side into the miles and miles of Midwestern corn.

But I remember his name, and the night he knocked on my door, smiling at the worn out carpet on the hallway floor, asking if I could come down and unlock his back door—turned out everyone in the building had a master key to everyone else’s fire escape entrance, which if I’d given a shit about anything at the time would have probably made me nervous, but as it was struck me as suitably insane and exactly what you’d expect in Chicago, but he’d lost his. I said of course, and grabbed my keys from the wobbly hall table under which I knew and did not care that there was a dead cockroach the size of a sizeable frog, lying on its back—what could possibly have killed a cockroach that size? Old age?—and followed Antoine downstairs.

He knocked once. Inside, a hand undid the chain, and I stepped into the apartment where he lived with a shifting group of eight, maybe ten people, I assumed his family and various others who needed a place to sleep. There were mattresses and bedrolls crowding the floor, televisions everywhere, none of them on, an overpowering dimness that for some reason reminded me of childhood summers. Every surface was covered visibly with dust, as if even the air in these three rooms did not move, as if stasis inhered in the place, and the ceiling fan was stopped. Antoine led me through the living room and kitchen, saying they were in the middle of packing up to move, which was not true but I nodded and said, Oh, for sure, like I understood, which I did, in the way any itinerant person knows the look of the wreck of a life on sight, and doesn’t need to ask.

I unlocked the back door, said goodnight to Antoine and his mother and grandmother and uncles and cousins and somebody’s baby, big-eyed and silent in an old woman’s lap, and I climbed up the fire escape to my own door, which I thereafter left unlocked.

At night, Antoine leaned in the doorway to the building, watching the gathering shadows in the corners of the courtyard. Backlit by hall light, the bodies of men.

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.