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FROM Slouching Towards Chicago
1.
"I used to think you had no feeling," one of my closest friends said to me. "Now I see; it's just that you're from Chicago."
This was Minneapolis and I was celebrating the first anniversary of my sobriety. My friends, the ones who had stayed with me through the changes, hugged me, handed me cards and wrapped packages. My lover, Linnea, kissed me on the cheek, whispered in my ear, "I still love you. I still love us."
I grew up a few blocks south of Chicago, at the edge of a horseshoe of suburbs that cluster the city's southern industrial base. This is the Calumet region on the far South Side, named for the Calumet and Little Calumet Rivers, dirty ribbons of water that cut though a plain of steel mills and paint factories, then run south into the suburbs.
Riding Amtrak into Chicago from the south, the train passes through the Calumet region. Wisconsin Steel, Sherman Williams Paint, the dead Little Calumet river. Slag heaps, piles of deflated old car frames, unsteady jumbles of old railroad ties, crushed barrels, cracked pieces of wall, bent wheels, cement chunks, crushed light bulbs, ceramic shards.
And paper, oh the paper. Newspapers, hamburger wrappers, flyers, shopping bags. Greasy and wadded or flat sheets rising in the smoking air.
Closer in, through the South Loop, the warehouses are abandoned, windows punched out, gray-streaked walls marked with gang insignias and AmeriKKKa in six-foot-tall graffiti.
I come from the edge of all this. The outer south edge of the city. The lower edge of the middle class. The Polack edge of white. Just over the edge of black South Chicago. A bit of an edge on black south suburbia. I come from the inside lip of alcohol. I am the lesbian edge of my family.
All my relatives come from Chicago. Eastern Europe, to the Minnesota Iron Range, and then down into Chicago. South Side. Catholic. Democrat. White. Croatian. German. Polack. Pronounce it "Chi caw go". If you're white and don't pronounce the long "aw", the Mayor Daley drawl, you are not from there. Sometimes in Minneapolis I'll look out over some bank of the Mississippi river and notice a few faceless silos, one or two smoking pipes, a sliver of what I know of urban industry, and Chicago's South Side will tug at my gut. I come from some place
ugly, and I miss it.
FROM The Opposite of God
I'M STANDING HERE trembling on the Sibley Boulevard train platform and it feels like the end of something. The air is sticky, even though it's early. Downtown, near Lake Michigan, it will be cooler. But here, on the South Side, above the traffic, above the old cement buildings, the rows and rows of square brick houses, humidity sticks to everything like rubber cement.
It was breezy where Lilly lived, last time I saw her. But I don't mean to think of Lilly. I stand here in the thin seven a.m. light on my way to the Chicago Loop, to my summer job as a clerk's assistant in the teller's circle of the Exchange National Bank, and without meaning to I keep thinking of throwing myself in front of the commuter train.
The urge to jump is a sound, high pitched, almost a squeal, a kind of holy music filling me up as if it is me. I've just turned nineteen, finally legal in Chicago bars. In two weeks I return to college. I'm going to be a career woman, a journalist. There's no reason for me to think about something so stupid as jumping.
FROM Miss South Side of Chicago
I'm not the daughter my parents wanted. They would have preferred Miss South Side of Chicago-a girl with a talent for ballet or baton and no talent for recognizing the family sadness. A blond beauty pageant winner. The family prize. The one who would carry them to better and better neighborhoods. The prettiest, most outgoing, football-loving white girl born south of 103rd and Torrence.
South is the direction my mother moved, once she married and left her home. She grew up in the South Deering projects, three blocks from 103rd and Torrence, two blocks from Wisconsin Steel. At the turn of the century it was a steel mill neighborhood, practically its own little city. My grandfather worked for the sanitary district, in the plant that cleaned shit from the water supply, but most of the neighborhood men were steelworkers. Today the mills are pretty much vacant-rusted old frames and piles of copper-colored slag. Now mostly Blacks and Mexicans live there. "It's gotten bad," my family says.
Of the two sisters in her family, my mother is the smart one. Her name is Bebe, short for Beatrice, and she was pretty enough. Black-and-white photos of Bebe in her early twenties look like the calendar shots you see of Marilyn Monroe before she bleached her hair. But my mother didn't have time to be a beauty queen. She concentrated on putting herself through college, majoring in math and physical education, the only one in her family to go past high school. Her little sister, my Aunt Lucy, was taller, bigger-breasted, thin as a stick from her waist to her thighs, an expert at fixing her hair and applying eyeliner. She was a natural blond and could have been Miss South Side, but she concentrated on getting a job as a telephone operator when she finished high school, and then on getting married, and then on moving to a big house in California.
My mom, Aunt Lucy, me. We're all Miss South Side; none of us are Miss South Side. There's really no such thing. Every neighborhood has its royalty-Miss Stony Island, Miss Calumet Park, Miss Tulip Festival of South Holland-but there's no single queen to represent the whole thing. The mills. The paint factories. The dead terrain. The landfills. The sanitary district. The graffiti and rickety commuter lines. The old neighborhoods that white people say went bad when the colors changed. The boxy brick near South Side suburbs where I went to grade school. The small-but-sleek prefab split-levels a bit further south where my parents live still, that I hear people say are going bad now too.
But Miss South Side is more than all this. She's a talkative white girl who chews gum and uses a curling iron to flip her blond bangs up off her forehead. A party girl who would hang by her ankles out a moving car to root for the Bears, the Bulls, the White Sox. A straight girl who fears the Blacks, the queers, all the unsavory characters that have taken over the old neighborhoods. She's good at math but better at gymnastics. She's surprisingly elegant in high-heeled pumps and a tight little dress in red or bright yellow. She laughs loud, talks rough, doesn't like to sit around. She's every businessman's favorite teller or waitress. She's the bright blond head wearing a silver crown that makes bad memories disappear. She's the one I could have been. She is nothing like me.
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