There’s a foyer dangling with massive paper airplanes.

There’s the “Artist Coat Room” through that door.

Walking through that door, you’re crossing from hotel to art gallery meeting space, from rooms with names like #381 to rooms with names like The Cassatt Ballroom and Warhol.

You also crossed from Rosemont to Chicago. And here’s the story of how Chicago’s city limits run through the middle of a hotel. 

In 1947, the Chicago City Council picked the commercial airport, formerly Douglas Aircraft production facility, former farming community of Orchard Place, as the home of a new international airport. Midway, which saw its first commercial flights in 1926, was and is surrounded by city so couldn’t grow. Although work started on Meigs Field in 1922, the Depression put construction on hold until after WWII.

Also, until Richard M. Daley pulled what in municipal politics is known as a “dick move” in 2003, Meigs was on a dang island. No way to grow.

The land around the former Orchard Place was relatively set up for aviation, surrounded by farmland to grow into — and belonged to other people. Chicago didn’t care. They named it “O’Hare” and started clearing out everything but the old cemetery (which they got rid of in 2012). The city annexed the land in 1956, keeping all that sweet future tax revenue within grasp.

Here’s the thing: Cities gotta touch. You can’t just pick bits of noncontiguous land and say “This is mine now.” You’ve got to twist and turn and amoeba the heck out of those borders to annex real estate. So the borders connecting Chicago to O’Hare are somewhat… odd.

In addition to the random blips that tell tales of developers past, the twin villages of Norridge and Harwood Heights are entirely swallowed by Chicago, as is a section of unincorporated Norwood Park township that is completely surrounded by a city it’s no part of. (John Wayne Gacy did his killings in that blot of township, and since I found that out I can’t stop thinking about how many boys might not have died if the people who reported their early suspicions to the Chicago Police Department knew they should have called the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.)

Chilling, but back to airplanes.

To connect that soon-to-be-valuable airport land to the city’s tax base, the city also annexed an eensy-weensy, itty-bitty microsliver of a slip of a thread of a line around Higgins Road to get to the land. When the local villages complained, the city decided to shift their connector south, taking over a larger strip along Foster in 1961.

This larger strip of land is seven-tenths of a mile long and, at its thinnest point, about 200 feet wide. This rope tethering an airport to a city contains some warehouses, a taxi dispatcher, a Mexican restaurant my wife says is pretty good and half a hotel.

The InterContinental Chicago O’Hare hotel opened in Rosemont — entirely in Rosemont — in September 2008, just a week before Lehman Bros.’ bankruptcy helped collapse the world economy. The developer was in bankruptcy court less than a year later and New York-based Loews Hotels snapped up the property in 2014.

When Loews was looking to do an art-themed expansion with floor-to-ceiling bones, dangling paper airplanes and meeting rooms with names like Warhol, Cassatt and Pollock, there was no place to move but into Chicago. The hotel at 5300 River Road, Rosemont, expanded into 9420 Foster Avenue, Chicago.

Back on the suburban side of the door, I wait for an opening at the front desk. There’s a wall of flatscreen TVs in the lobby, Euro-designed furniture offering seats for the weary and another gallery piece that, try as I might, I can’t see as anything more artistic than “rocks hanging from string.”

My opening comes and a dapper man in a three-piece suit greets me. I ask about the Chicagoness of building’s other side. He confirms. I ask if there are any rules, regulations, any different ordinances or codes the staff must obey on one side of that magical border door but not the other.

“Probably,” he says, flicking me a grin.

Read about another weird municipal border

It happened most recently on a train from O’Hare. A haul down the stairs they put up to replace the elevator a Blue Line crashed through. A jog down the path toward already dinging, about-to-leave ‘L’ cars. A last-minute heave through the doors into a crowded car with, somehow, two empty seats.

I hopped toward one of the seats, then hopped away before I sat down. I crossed to the other end of the car to stand next to a bicyclist who would ram people with wheels as his rolling machine sloshed around the train’s stops and starts.

It was as far as I could get from the empty, open seats.

Some might have guessed what happened. A man next to the open seats — the reason for the open seats — smelled so bad the adjectives started being ones about taste.

He smelled bitter. He smelled acrid. The air was downright tangy around the man with the rasta hat on his head and the white cloth bag with all his possessions on the seat next to him.

The man shifted in his seat and scowled as, stop after stop down the line, people of all races, genders, classes and creeds would see the openings on the crowded car, move toward them and then move away after a few sniffs of the air.

It got very crowded by the bicycle.

The man looked uncomfortable and angry. I know he knew how bad he smelled. I know he had no choice in the matter as he rode up and down the line just for a place to stay out of the cold.

The man bothered no one. He didn’t ask for money nor was rude. He sat with arms crossed trying to shrink into his seat. He wasn’t ashamed nor bashful. He just seemed uncomfortable and acutely aware of the looks he was getting from the people keeping a three-foot perimeter away from him.

Human kindness falters when locked in a metal tube with a man whose odor you can feel in your mouth.

Some of the looks the man received were angry. Some of the looks were sympathetic. Some people were deliberately not acknowledging the man, choosing overtly loud conversations on any other topic as a form of kindness to the man.

The foot-treads of slush on the car floor had dried into gray-and-black whorls and swirls. People fresh off airplanes chattered in a dozen different languages while tired workers in airport restaurant and security uniforms bobbed heads as they tried to stay away. Black, red, silver, brown luggage filled the aisles. A bicycle sloshed by the far end of the car.

And through it all, a man sat alone, isolated by how the world had made him smell.

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Another tale of uncomfortable urban proximity

“Does this go downtown? To the Forest Park?” one asked, pointing at the nearby car.

“Yes,” I said. “It does.”

Tag, I thought to myself as I lugged my own rolling cart two cars down. You’re it.

I’m home from my trip. I’m home and in the part of the homecoming game where I’m asleep on the couch by 8 and up at 1 a.m.

I’ve done the bit where I’ve glared at the gas station across the street from me and thought how much nicer the Blue Mosque was as a view. I’ve done the part of texting my mom to say the plane landed and getting annoyed at the newest TSA rule changes.

(Why do I now have to check out after getting my luggage with a picture I took at the kiosk five minutes earlier? What is the purpose of that guy knowing what I looked like without a bag?)

I’ve gotten kisses from my ladyfriend and laid out my souvenirs for sundry others. My clothes have been sitting in the dryer since the afternoon. I described to the best of my ability the difference between a kebab in Azerbaijan and one in Turkey and the difference between the cheese in Tbilisi and the stuff in Istanbul.

(“I couldn’t tell he was a terrorist until I saw a poorly printed photo of him taken before he took his luggage off the carousel,” the hero security guard told the media.)

It becomes a game for those who travel, the homecoming game. The tips and tricks we collect to make the last bits of travel more peaceful. Shoes off on the plane so your feet don’t swell. 5 points. Wet naps for the face. 10. Ventra card in the pocket so you don’t have to scramble through bags at the CTA station. 15 points and level up.

(And why security after the luggage carousel anyway? For every bag with something worth stealing, there are 6,000 like mine, filled with two weeks of dirty undies and three Schrödinger’s wine bottles [neither broken nor unbroken until you open the box {I did mention I was writing this in a bout of jetlag insomnia, yes?}])

Train home instead of cab. 50 points. Wondering about work. -12 points. Thinking you should check email. -20 points. Wondering how you’ll be able to afford all you just did. -200.

Wondering when your memories of the train to Baku will blur with the Metra to the office. -30. The view from the window of the ‘L’ home a minigame of little pluses and minuses. A point here for spotting a place you missed or a site you know. A point gone for remembering why it’s good to leave in the first place.

The fat man who always seems to be talking to neighbors on his porch just north of the California stop, a power-up. The endless scream of concrete, cars and suburban office parks before you get to the city, a boss level of depression you have to push on through.

(I wonder what the guy whose job it is to check photos taken five minutes earlier thinks his job is. He’s not crosschecking the photo against anything other than my face. “Yep. Still no mustache,” he thinks to himself several hundred times a day.)

I got the right gifts for the right people. I’m reasonably coherent for the lack of sleep, I didn’t get sick on the plane, the Georgian wine bottles didn’t break and I didn’t lose anything of value on the trip. In this ritualized game we’ve made of travel, where you have to accumulate pictures, anecdotes and a couple boxes of local snacks for the office break room, I did all right.

The final tally of the homecoming game is how long the feeling lasts. Stress stores, so we somehow assume relaxation is equally easy to chuck in some Tupperware and keep in the freezer for later use.

The world doesn’t work like that. If at the end, the fond memories and wonderful times of an excursion outlast the jarring lament of coming home to bills, commutes and mysteriously thick letters from the IRS about your last filing, you’ve got a shot at winning.

Will I win this homecoming game? I’m not sure, but thinking back on the times spent and people met in three different countries, thinking about that morning on the rock beach at Batumi, thinking about the taste of Georgian wine, thinking about the view from Baku’s maiden’s tower and the night a blood-red moon hung pregnant over the Blue Mosque as cargo ships slipped silently through the straits, I’m feeling good about my odds.

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Man, I hate the TSA

A story of local travel

“That doesn’t exist,” she said.

“I have seriously never been here.”

“I didn’t know they had a plane here.”

We stopped and looked at the WWII era replica airplane.

We were lost. In a place we had been a thousand times.

After our flight was cancelled out of Kansas City, Missouri, (KCMO — see what I did with the story title there?), we had a three-hour delay before the next one, which itself was delayed half an hour coming in, then we spent an hour on the tarmac at O’Hare waiting for a gate to open up, then we had to stand in the cold boarding ramp to get the carry-ons they made us valet and then I made the damn fool decision to go and pee.

This last part is what took us down a tendril of O’Hare with a children’s play area, a “Wicker Park Sushi,” a giant WWII era plane and no prior knowledge of our surroundings.

Our original plan of a 4:30 flight got us off the plane at 11 p.m. It had been a long day.

Waxing poetic about O’Hare is hard, especially at night. Then, the wide-eyed newbie travelers and seasoned pros just aren’t there. There’s no hustle, no bustle, no long passionate kisses between reunited lovers. The joy and passion of travel, the excitement and anticipation of soon being rocketed through the skies doesn’t exist at night.

At night, O’Hare is just a very well-lit commercial building with closed stores and the occasional TSA worker eating a sandwich.

For those trivia buffs out in the world, O’Hare is a part of Chicago proper, annexed in the ’50s via a long thin strip miles long and 200 feet wide. Cities have to be contiguous, you see. So to get the tax revenue from the once-rural airstrip, Chicago had to reach out and grab it.

The building where we wandered, lost among closed sushi restaurants, Chicago.

The tarmac where we waited an hour, Chicago.

The boarding ramp where our breath congealed to fog as we waited for what would have been a perfectly acceptable carry-on in the original, larger plane that got canceled out of KCMO, Chicago.

We had been in Chicago going on two hours and we hadn’t been able to leave the building yet.

We kissed by the escalator. She was taking a cab. I was taking the Blue Line.

“Bye, babe,” she said, gripping my coat lapel a bit as she broke away from the kiss.

“Bye,” I said.

There’s no hustle or bustle at an airport at night. Exhaustion and empty corridors replace the romance of travel. It’s an empty time for an airport. It’s an empty time for the outstretched arm of a grasping city.

But at the very least, I got out of Missouri.

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I mean, I guess I could have gone through a machine that would simulate a nude photo of me for a government worker to look at alone in a windowless room somewhere in O’Hare International Airport.

(Before you correct me, the TSA switchover from backscatter radiation scanners to millimeter-wave technology at O’Hare is scheduled to be completed in January. Also, although our choice was between a pat-down and one of the millimeter-wave scanners, I’m not comfortable with the images it takes even if it converts those images into a generic unisex outline before the TSA agents see it. It doesn’t matter if you turn my nude pics into Gumby; I don’t want them to exist at all.)

But instead of having the government use radiation to photograph me fake-nude before I participated in a voluntary transaction between myself and a subsidiary of publicly traded AMR Corporation, I opted to let a low-ranking government employee touch my cock through my pants and a pair of rubber gloves he later tested for drugs.

It’s OK to touch someone’s genitals if you use the back of your hand, apparently. I wish I had known that rule in high school.

It’s appropriate for me to make jokes here. After all, that’s where we hear our criticism of these tactics. Stand-up comics. Local newspaper humor columnists. Twitterers.

Yes, there are more cogent, rational critics — ProPublica and PBS have done a yeoman’s effort in notifying the public of everything from the backscatter cancer risk (six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could develop cancer from the machines, they say) to the high rate of false positives from the millimeter-wave scanners (23 to 54 percent, sez dem).

But instead of protests and action, we have passive disdain that evaporates the moment we get past security and have to find our gate. We have a snide, cloying TSA blog that jokes off all criticism because fuck you, that’s why. When they switch to a less dangerous technology, they expect us to thank them.

The jokesters and gagmen are the only ones most of us hear with a word toward this.

So I chose to let a government worker paid $13.70 an hour and hired, according to an April press release from the TSA, for such attributes as a “Mental ability to observe and identify objects” make me stand with my legs spread wide. He put on a pair of blue rubber gloves and wrapped one, two hands of blue around my calf, then slowly moved upward along my leg. He repeated the process on the other side and on my arms, then flipped his hands over to quickly brush over my penis and testicles through the front of my khakis.

No, I didn’t feel violated. I felt that I should have. I would have felt violated years ago. But that’s not us anymore. Even if we have machines simulating nude photos of our children, even if we pay people to quickly rub our junk and finger our waistbands, we no longer feel violated. We feel inconvenienced.

A grown man touched my genitals through my clothing and I worried it would take too long and I might not have time to grab lunch before my flight.

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Read about another show of force in Chicago

Backscatter vs. Millimeter-wave (slightly out-of-date on which airports use which)

TSA hiring requirements

The train came through the darkness to light, pulling into the train station at O’Hare International Airport. A couple slumped over their roller bags in exhaustion as if they were coming from the airports instead of heading to.  The world’s tiniest service dog peeked around, appreciative of all the new sounds it could hear on its master’s behalf.

We braced for the madhouse to follow; they for the security and liquid-tossing and random old people who I’m pretty well convinced get rides to the airport just to have skycaps run them back and forth across the concourse in the little carts with flashing lights.

I was there for the bus. The Van Galder to home, passing through crowds and madness to sit in a groundplane. From there through vanishing cornfields and springing-up Monopoly houses that make up the I-90 corridor to Rockford, birthplace of the Sock Monkey, Cheap Trick and me.

It was the day before Thanksgiving. We were at O’Hare.

And then… nothing.

Granted, I was heading to the bus. The moving sidewalk past the mural of world cultures (culminating in the Sears Tower and Smurfit-Stone, of course) was a ride of less than a city block, then up to the Cubs parking level and a few feet to the bus.

But there was nothing. None of the chaos or madness I had been trained to anticipate from movies, TV and those news reporters who make a yearly tradition out of stories they know where will happen.

Maybe I was early. Maybe those TSA guards aren’t there to keep terrorists and liquids out, but holiday insanity and wacky “Home Alone” style antics in. (“Oh no! We forgot Kevin!”)

But everything was nice and fine and easy. I got a seat on the bus and didn’t even have to have anyone next to me. There wasn’t even much traffic.

It was a holiday miracle I appreciate all the more more now that I’m safely tucked at my parent’s house typing on my dad’s iDoohickey, all filled up with turkey, pie and Cheap Trick music.

Merry Thanksgiving, everyone! And to all a good night!

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