Time Zones

Indiana has a switch in it. It’s the only reason that I remember going through it. The time changed. The clouds were unchanged. The highway stayed flat, clean and fully labeled, but the zone shifted. It was completely undetectable by me. I just looked at my phone and noticed the time was different from the time in my car.

The rest stops pay homage to truckers this far west.
And the police sit in SUV’s by the tollbooths and where the dividers should be on the highway pointing speed guns down the road.

The Ohio Turnpike turns 80 west into 90 west toward Chicago, and smack in the middle of Ohio and Chicago is the inopportune state of Indiana, bending south.

Gary and South Bend sound lewd to me. I don’t know what goes on there but I wonder in some Wachowski Brothers universe if whatever it goes on in some redundant time change loop.
The sun was going down. I wanted to get to Illinois before the night came and and I missed the dusk hue smother the city. A real city. I needed to see it. I needed to get back to the blunt citi-ness of this country. I wanted to see Chicago’s skylines lit up, looming under the coming darkness.

I was confused because for the first time since the trip began, the outside didn’t match my inside. I was missing an hour.

I knew I was in Chicago because of the traffic. It was city traffic, Merging onto I290 W was a welcomed change from truckers.

There is a Martin Luther King Ave in this city.

And a University Ave.

I was in the Midwestern part of the united states.
This is what happens when Frank Lloyd Wright’s vast, immaculate metropolis is dropped directly upon a plantation.

A miscegenation of urban and rural.

Where jheri curl meets red jeans.

There is irresistible blackness in this city. Irrepressible. Maybe because it was so hot outside. But entering downtown’s congestion felt good to me, snug and dangerous.

I came of 290 at Independence ave, looking for Garfield Park.

The city is affiliated by parks- each area is close to a specific one-and Garfield is a sprawled out space on the west side. Beautiful and lo landed, with a conservatory that likened the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx.

Garfield Park still has a slight glower at night. Driving into it in the darkness and noticing the low lying cars and somewhat parked hack cab looking Lincolns made me sit up in my seat a little because I needed to be more guarded.

In the morning I ran through that park, through a trail that was guarded by geese, passed a lake with old Black men fishing for catch I prayed they threw back, women, meditating alone on singular benches. It was early and the parked was so full- cars were parked and people were barbequing. The smell of the air and smoke and water had hands and arms and legs, when I breathed I danced with it.

My college friend Vernard took me out to eat soul food.  We got the itis by midday, but we fought through it and set on the green line to Harlem. The colors of Chicago’s train system remind me of the gay flag. There is even a pink line. I think it’s pretty. The entire color train system is above ground, and works well, It’s clean, calm, and (because of position) no rats. If there are crazy people in Chicago they don’t go upstairs to get on trains. It’s nice. This is a special and endearing part of this city, like a birthmark on a lover.

Sometimes the train seems obscured because of the buildings-the Trump plaza shouldn’t be where it is-but it doesn’t deter.

The topography of Chicago is easy, flat and wide- the perfect palate for planning transportation in a city. Chicago is mountain less. Barren of hills or dunes- a prepubescent Lolita propped up provocatively on lake Michigan.

I walked by the Art Institute of Chicago downtown and came to a small bust. Chicago was founded by a Black Man. A Haitian named Jean-Baptise Pointe Du Sable. All that I find is a bust of him on the river. The bust is bronzed. The features are robust. He is black. There was a lilt in the sadness of his mouth. A black man with beautiful lips that curb, have a tightness to them because he won’t even let anyone see them quiver. Obviously ethnic, even though the cast iron goatee under them seemed to be blowing in the wind. Hair is the compromise. His eyebrows and crown are more French. But his face was black.

People that I have met from Chicago throughout my life tell me about the Cubs and pizza. No one has ever mentioned Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable.

We went down to the Magnificent Mile. It was shorter than the shopping streets at home. Most of the buildings were about the same size and now Marshall Fields is Macys.

Most of the people were browner than the ones on these type streets back home.

When we walked over the bridge and down to the bean we saw Black families holding babies taking pictures, students of all colors getting to know each other, Muslim families in full garb enjoying the sun. There were white people, there were just a lot of brown people too. There was a sprinkler in the middle of two huge kiosks with human faces, they spit out pool smelling water to screaming gleeful children below. They jump and splash and two girls, one Black and one Asian, hold hands and spin in the shallowness of the pool edge.

Vernard and I left downtown and traveled to Hyde Park where the president and Louis Farrakhan live. Palatial estates, manicured and genial, home to academics that teach at the University of Chicago and others, diverse, dignified. The president has a temple at the end of his street.
The secret service wouldn’t let me get close enough to the take a picture of the president’s house.

Washington Park around the corner houses a Chicago Museum that looks like the NASA building. Except right on lake Michigan. The borders of the South and West side parks are pretty ghetto, but a beautiful ghetto, like the course edges of ungentrified streets in Harlem that give way to major promenades. The ghetto is constantly peaking out from the wide intersections and intimate streets.

There are plenty of abandoned buildings and square blocks of nothingness punctuated with overgrown weeds. But the abandonment is not loneliness like Cleveland’s blocks. There is still a regalness to the neighborhood that poverty cannot blight.

Late at night, for non-specific reasons, My friend and I were overcome with a serious hunger. Vernard decided to take me to a spot for Jerk chicken Tacos.

Chicago Jamaican food. When we get there the line is almost around the block, which isn’t unusual. What was most unusual to me were the people waiting outside. Chicago people. Many of whom were hunger for the same reason I was. Most of whom were loud, with a drawl that sounded ceaselessly southern. Step music blared from car speakers that sat on giant hydraulic tires. The songs competed with each other and the garish colors of the vehicles. I saw a Cadillac that was pee pee yellow. Not canary. Not even cab.

Toilet reflection.

Bile.

A CTA worker was waiting to place an order when a portly Black woman in a lace front wig and diaphanous halter-top cut him in line. He called out to her and she smiled, batted an eyelash and turned to him remarking that she would have been on line earlier but his bus didn’t get her to the block on time.

The bus driver let her slide.

As I ate my delicious tacos watching the block from next to a white town car on the largest tires I had ever seen. I watched Chicago’s hungry laugh and order tacos and flirt with each other.

The black people here do more than just greet each other hello upon eye contact in the street. They keep a subtle courtship going, much like Caribbean’s in the country do, when we use proverbial and one line banter to feel each other out.

The people in Chicago smile at each other when they chide each other. Roll their eyes and call each other, “darlin”.

This is different from New York, but maybe the people in this town feel the simple sexiness that I felt when I came upon the traffic of 290.

Common once rapped, “it’s the Black upon each other that we love so much”. He penned this line on these same streets.

Chicago has undemanding sexuality, like an Ojay’s song. It remains enticing even if not current, a sliver behind time, but still beautiful. Not like home. Not like any other place I have seen so far. And I love it.