I’ve been writing more than ever but feel like I have very little to say, and it’s been months since I’ve published anything but every word feels insufficient and has for some time.
The building where Royal Palms Shuffleboard is now, down in Wicker Park. It used to be a sort-of-dumpy garage where flower companies from across the city would swap packages to help make deliveries more efficient. No need for every flower shop to run all over the city, the thought was, so they all carved the city into territories and you could have members of the co-op deliver as many or as few of your outside deliveries as you wanted. (This is a large part of how I learned the grid: the boss sent me down there with boundaries and I had to make on-the-spot decisions with just a street guide giving me the numbers. No smart phones.)
I drove by there just before Christmas Eve and was surprised by memory of the years making delivery runs for the shop where I used to work. The building was unpainted yellow brick with two garage doors, one for coming and one for going. There was an “office” with “carpet.” Really thin, worn down, and I think just laid over the asphalt. Wooden chest-high plywood and two-by shelves around the perimeter of the building and a row extending from the wall between the two garage doors. Blacktop garage floor, just normal asphalt. Nothing nice.
Pull up the van. Beep twice. Wait for the door. Pull in. Back into our spot, which was nearest the office. Unload. Help other drivers unload. Check all the packages for tickets, check the addresses to make sure they’re in our territory. We don’t go to Schaumburg. Get back in. Wait for people to finish up. Everyone out at once, like a convoy. Except we’re all loaded with poinsettias and fruit baskets.
I only did this a few years, four or five maybe. It was a formative few years. I had my life ahead of me. I was working a ton, at whatever it was I was doing. Had to work. Always work.
The week or so before Christmas we’d make twice-a-day trips to the co-op on Milwaukee. Once in the morning, once at night. So I could get a 12 - 16 hour day out of it, depending on breaks and the time after to sort the packages and get tomorrow’s deliveries together. I was helping the drivers out in the morning, so it made sense to get their trips lined up the night before. Seven of those and it wasn’t a bad check at the end, especially for 22-year-old me.
I had a few realizations at once. The first, is that I’m old if I can remember “back when” about how this area used to be. Was just gentrifying, sometimes kids would still gangbang to you driving through there, but it had started the transition to what it is now.
The second is, I don’t think I’ll ever feel the world as full of possibilities as I did then, or have the optimism and naive belief that if I just worked hard then everything else would work itself out. Most days, this doesn’t bother me. This day, I felt disappointed with myself for believing things then I know now to be untrue. I was young, and foolish. A feeling of regret at my immaturity then.
There’s the “before” time, which for me, was before I really understood violence. And everything else. It’s not so linear , because coming to any understanding is a process. (Not that I “understand” now but I at least know it enough a force on my life, and the credible threat of it a force on everyone’s lives, to appreciate its presence.)
One year for New Year’s Eve I spent in the spare bedroom at the house of a woman my dad was dating, on 25th Avenue in Franklin Park, down the street from the high school. I had a radio, and B96 counted down the top 100 songs of the year. I was in third or fourth grade, I don’t know. Old enough to be excited about staying up late, and the feeling of music being new and adult and cool and all that. But young enough to not appreciate the consequence of people hurting others, even if I was familiar enough with the practice. I was optimistic, I suppose. Capable of feeling positive anticipation. At that age, I wasn’t processing or thinking about anything. I just lived day by day. Someone gets the shit beat out of them? OK, that happens, right? I didn’t have the life enough behind me to know what was abnormal or wrong. Kids adapt.
Another year, New Year’s Eve in the mobile home of a family friend who lived in a park near the airport, with the other kids who were near enough our age. Snacks and loud music. Most of my childhood really, this sienna-toned carpet that was ubiquitous and smoke and lots of liquor and loud behavior. The kitchen ended at the cabinets with a countertop that formed half wall next to the front room, and we all fit in those two rooms. A friend of my mom’s needed to run out and I went with, we stopped for snacks at a liquor store and then parked outside someone’s house for a minute. I waited outside while she ran in, ran out. I didn’t know why but I sat there listening to the radio. I don’t remember the night ending.
One year in college I spent New Year’s Eve in the city, money I didn’t have, on a hotel room and a nice dinner. With the lights off still an ambient glow inside, everything shades of dark gray but the rich colors in places showing through, just dark. White sheets gray, carpet gray, walls gray. Winter outside. Warm inside.
Then a few more years in a car with the windows cracked parked somewhere south listening for gunfire at midnight, one of those years with my foot in a walking boot. That night a murder, the last of the year, the blood coagulated under new snow. Sangria-red at the center, pink slush around the edges where the pooling stopped. And the cops using hot water to look for shell casings. I remember thinking it a beautiful night otherwise, just a gentle snow and everything muted some. Like you could almost hear the snow, by how quiet it made everything else sound.
Around midnight. The amount of gunfire was surprising, because you could hear it layered. Like July 4th without the colors, all around midnight but spread over miles. Some police supervisors thought work at midnight an ill-advised enterprise. They’d tell officers to park under a viaduct, respond to calls, but don’t go chasing someone standing on their porch letting a few rounds go if nobody’s calling 911. But everyone has their motivations. Young then, too. The police shot someone in Woodlawn just after midnight, then shot someone else in the hundreds. Spent the night hobbling around those scenes, trying to get what I could. Everyone cold, wet, and in a foul mood.
Listening:
Creative Retrieval
Florence + The Machine
Reading:
Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
A Christmas Carol