Listen & Read: The Passenger
My Chicago Origin Story as Performed at CHIRP Radio's First Time Series, August 23, 2023
This month (May 1 to be precise) marks 26 years since my first move to Chicago. To celebrate with me, listen and/or read my story The Passenger that I wrote for CHIRP Radio’s First Time performance series at Martyrs’ back in August. I just realized they’d posted the audio! It includes the band playing the song that I chose for them to cover.
Welcome to Chicago: Mayor Richard M. Daley!
My first pass under that highway welcome sign, through the borders of this City I’d four years later call Home, along Lake Michigan on Lake Shore Drive, was Memorial Day weekend 1994. Age 19, summer before my junior year at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. The first face-to-face visit with my goth friend Max in Northwest Indiana. A pen pal since high school, senior year, when I started making friends from afar through a transpostal snail mail weirdo network filled with painted envelopes and handwritten poetry; mix tapes and recorded ramblings; “friendship books” whose pages offered pre-digital profiles listing bands, likes, and our addresses often cloaked in pen names: I am “Sven from the Graveyard” of Detroit, Michigan. The Cure, Anne Rice, candles.
Call this my Chicago origin story.
So yes, this year I celebrate twenty-five years since first moving here to this mythical, close-but-not, other Midwest City. Seen only in film, TV, and iconic images. As I developed my artistic and other tendencies, Detroit and Michigan–and okay maybe my family too, love them like I do–were places to escape from to someplace bigger and better and more alive. A City to stake out and make my own.
While I briefly left a couple times, Chicago has been Home in all its various iterations: from roommate days with my friend Sarah a year out of college when a two-bedroom apartment in Lakeview could go for $850 a month; to seventeen years with my husband where we left and came back; left again and then I came back alone in 2018. When I didn’t know if I wanted to come back. Too big, too loud, too painful. When I wanted to hide in a house in a forest on top of a mountain. But I’d moved here once without him and I could do it again. So here I am.
Still bleary eyed from Rocky Horror the night before, Max and the crew–Art, Teresa, Alexis, Katrina–and I pile into his dark blue, four-door, straight-six cylinder, three-on-the-tree, 1963 Chevy Bel Air–with its steel dashboard and no seat belts. AKA “The Beast.” With its cassette deck Max added where we listen to Siouxie, Nine Inch Nails, Concrete Blonde, and others. Strange tunes for the old boy born when Bobby Vinton; the Chiffons; and Peter, Paul, & Mary would likely be playing from his original transistor radio.
First pass along Lake Michigan on Lake Shore Drive: where we first connect with the Lakefront Trail, through Grant Park, Oak Street and North Avenue Beaches. I peer out my passenger side window at all the shirtless, gorgeous men. Volleyballers and bikers and joggers and oh, so many rollerbladers. Tanned and muscled–or not, who cares? Beach bods I envy but, oh, that’s not exactly me. Staring, having never before seen scenery like this. Maybe drooling. Max laughing, celebrating this awakening, this unrealized-to-me part of the Chicago myth. I have arrived. This is where I want to be. The theatre and arts stuff, sure yeah yeah. But the guys! And here I am, a pale elder alternateen with my chin-length hair, cut-off black pants, two week old concert t-shirt from seeing Līve on their Throwing Copper tour, and broken in Doc Marten boots two years into wear. What would these guys want with me? Never mind they are possibly, probably, mostly straight. I have a habit of falling for the straight boys.
All this revelation before we even reach ground zero of our adventures at Clark & Belmont. Where we meet up with another pen pal of mine, a cool chick named Frogger from an Illinois town I’d never heard of. Lunch at Scenes Cafe where all the actors hang and read plays before Starbucks kicks them out. Where I sip on cold cherry cider and feast on a vegetarian pizza burger and try my first blue corn chips. Then onto the awe-inspiring The Alley, which dominates the intersection before fucking Target takes over. With its leather jackets and tees and cool things where we hear bits of conversation like, “Dave would like this when he gets out of jail!” We laugh and sift through a barrel of old 80s band buttons, unfastened pins occasionally pricking our fingers. We take a group photo with the Dunkin “Punkin’” Donuts sign behind us.
We stroll all along Clark Street and Belmont Avenue, with stores like Rocket 69 filled with candles and incense, oils and jewelry, groovy goodies I can’t buy if I want gas money for the drive home. Then on to Boystown and People Like Us Bookstore where I do buy a “Hate is Not a Family Value” magnet and regret not buying one exclaiming “Straight? So is Spaghetti Until You get it Wet.” And to the rainbow-swag filled We’re Everywhere, a store name as both political statement and promise of the 90s. Both stores long gone now.
Dusk, we walk to the Lake where we sit on the since bulldozed–what I’ll come to know as the–Belmont Rocks. A shoreline of uneven limestone slabs that birthed a culture, a community. We do not realize the communion we are having with this sacred space with the City behind us as we light incense, smoke clove cigarettes, and talk of love; looking for lightning bolts between the stars, listening for distant thunder. We don’t know we have passed through so, so many ghosts. Thirty-some years of queer folk daring to celebrate their love in the sun. A lost generation of gay men remembered by the Lake’s lapping waves, their survivors and successors, of which I feel I fall somewhere in between.
I realize I’m romanticizing this moment some. I suppose it’s my way of connecting to something larger than myself. Of saying, yeah I was a tiny part of that history whose days were numbered by the time I moved here. Holding my friends but also wishing that my sort of first boyfriend back in Michigan who I’d met at the end of the school year was here. I, a baby gay then–and frankly a middle-aged gay now–still figuring out his world, wanting the best of friends and lovers together.
The Beast winds back south on Lake Shore towards midnight, the skyline aglow. And before I know it, it’s May 1, 1998 and I’m heading back north, the driver this time, a U-haul ignoring the No Trucks sign merging from I-55. Sarah in her own Beast and we’re jammed by Cubs game pedestrians upon realizing our street just south of Wrigley is the wrong one-way. All before collapsing onto the carpet of our three-flat garden apartment where we only stay a year, because rats.
And then it’s my first Pride Parade with Max and our pal Vid sunburning at the Rocks. And it’s rediscovering Boystown and making friends and Greg the Roscoe’s bouncer waving me in, saying, “Hello, Michael,” without checking my ID. Dancing and kissing and fretting and scribbling phone numbers on bar cards. It’s temping and table-whoring; and writing and telling and expressing and grad schooling; and sitting in dark theatres seeing friends and strangers and famous actors too because we’re here–we arts majors and weirdos and dreamers and be-ers–we’re really here in this magical place; and it’s biking on the Lakefront Trail where maybe a first timer is riding by, lusting over me.
And in there somewhere it’s October 2001 and meeting my husband while perusing porn at the very much still there Unabridged Bookstore; and it’s adventures and apartments and Godfather’s pizza and wine and parties and domesticity and love. And it’s leaving and adult conversations and returning and connecting and reconnecting and exploring and discovering and conquering–and fucking breathing, like how I’d love to tell my younger fretful self to do once upon a time.
And it’s here, right up here on this stage. Us, together. This myth, this City. It was written, it was made, however we got here, for you and me.
(Yes, it’s an Iggy Pop song, but for me, it’s Siouxie.)
