1,001 Chicago Afternoons

A blue-gold can of Hamm’s Premium exploded in foam against the wall.

One of the men on the Clark/Lake Blue Line platform had whipped it through the closing train car doors at the last possible moment before they shut entirely. It was impressive timing undercut by the doors immediately re-opening.

The old black street person and the young white college kid stared at the open doors and the mess of foam and domestic pale lager one of them had created. » Read the rest of this entry «

A ratty man with a ratty, chest-level wisp of a beard reminisced with a well-dressed acquaintance about a laundromat in Southport “where you could drink beer and have a burger.”

“It’s gone now, I think,” the well-dressed one responded.

The trick is not making it sound like you’ll miss it more than you really will. » Read the rest of this entry «

In honor of the longstanding journalistic tradition of columnists punting it on holidays with shitty poems (lookin’ at you, Schmich), a work penned while waiting for my parents and sister to leave for Aunt Mary’s without me:

I truly love my family,
A love both earthly and ethereal.
But this Christmastime, I’ll sit alone
And binge-listen to Serial. » Read the rest of this entry «

The card told her to scratch off all the 36es, so she did.

Then the 18s. And the 67s.

One by one, she wordlessly, ceaselessly searched out numbers in the eight five-by-five boxes on the instant lottery card and destroyed them, one by one, to see if she could get her $5 back and maybe a few hundred thousand bucks on top. » Read the rest of this entry «

Two ticket takers on the Metra stood in the divot where the stairs lead down to the still-closed outer door. They had been talking for about 10 minutes about a co-worker who died two years before retirement.

One was older, fatter, black and patient. The other was younger, taller, wiry and white. The younger one looked around with fight in his eyes, as if every person, ticket, metal wall and announcement voice was making him angrier.

They were leaning back on the partition walls, facing each other.

“What would you do if you didn’t have to do anything?” the older one asked. » Read the rest of this entry «

Somehow, walking down the street covered in blood was not the worst commute my office saw yesterday morning. » Read the rest of this entry «

“Rockford, Ill.—so named because it was founded at the site of a ford across the Rock River—is a pleasant, tree-smothered city 90 miles northwest of Chicago.”
– Life Magazine, 1949

“A hardscrabble town in the middle of America, the place is not much more than an intersection of interstates and railway lines…”
– Rolling Stone, 2008

I went home on Thursday. » Read the rest of this entry «

She sat in the back row of a double-length city bus, lounging like the two massive boxes flanking her were the arms of a throne.

The regent herself was late teens or early 20s, fond of that particular brand of hipster gear divided between 2014 and 1991. A multicolored, flat-brimmed baseball cap was crammed over a head of dark, curly hair. She wore thick-framed plastic glasses.

She sat between two 18-inch cubes wrapped in brown paper.

“Mind if I ask what’s in the boxes?” I asked. » Read the rest of this entry «

Grover hates it when they kill themselves.

“You’ve got to have a thick skin,” he said for the third or fourth time. “You’ve got to have thick skin.” » Read the rest of this entry «

I spent International Workers Day at work, which was appropriate. » Read the rest of this entry «