Mentioning Uptown in my previous post made me think of this.
Since getting Kallie in a new day care situation closer to home I’ve been able to return to my normal route of taking Lake Shore Drive to get to work. (It’s fun to say to co-workers and superiors, “I took LSD this morning.”) As I was driving toward the lake the other morning I took Wilson Ave. When I passed Malden Street I smiled, adjusting the visor against the rising sun, and thought about the long, miserable year I spent in a studio apartment there back in the 90s–and the extraordinary thing I saw happen there.
It was my fifth year living in Chicago. I’d spent the majority of that time living in Lakeview but when my roommate Mark and I decided to get our own places I knew my budget wouldn’t afford me to live there. So I had to look elsewhere. Never one to stray too far from “knowns” and comfort zones I wasn’t too sure what was even around Lakeview. Pricey Lincoln Park was directly south, so I looked north. I found the place on Malden pretty quickly in a neighborhood called Uptown. The building was pretty crappy, but the apartment itself wasn’t bad–a two room studio with an eat-in kitchen, pretty big main room and a big dressing room connecting it to the bathroom. What I liked most is that it was still in walking distance to familiar surroundings (bars and clubs.)
The building manager’s name was Monika with a “k”. Middle aged and German, she was pleasant enough to fool me into not judging the building by its looks, but rather implied there was a hidden charm where none truly existed. But at $360 a month I didn’t have the luxury of arguing with the economics of the situation. Time was running out and it would have to do. I could always get out of it if it was too bad, couldn’t I?
My bestie and her tween kids helped move me in from the lovely vintage apartment to this dreary studio in an iffy neighborhood. In retrospect, I was clearly kidding myself. How would I survive a year in such a desolate place? Kathy kindly assured me the year would speed by before I knew it. I had to fool myself and agree. There was no other choice.
Coming home from work meant climbing the once beautiful staircase and breathing in the odd scent of aqua net, cigarette smoke and body soil to unlock the one unimpressive lock on my door. The halls of the building were haunted by an older woman wearing a house coat who delivered our mail by sliding it under the door. (What a fool I was to assume there were mailboxes around somewhere.) It was an odd system, and it was when I moved there that I only intermittently received my bible…er…TV Guide. I think our mail matron helped herself to my subscription. I often considered turning her into the US Post Master General, but that seemed like it would involve far more work than satisfaction.
There was an elderly couple who lived directly across the hall. They were probably the only people I saw–or heard–on a regular basis in the building, except for mail lady. He seemed to be somewhat of an alcoholic who yelled–and worse–at all hours of the day and night. She was stone faced and wordless when I saw her, a cigarette always dangling from the corner of her mouth. Always.
The neighborhood itself was completely sketch thanks to a well-known methadone clinic over on Broadway. Jittery derelicts drifted around the neighborhood like plastic shopping bags in the wind. I allowed very few friends to visit me there and when my folks dropped me off after holidays I never let them come up. Seeing it in person would be worse than anything they could have imagined. Plus, it would make it real for them–and for me. Not seeing it meant they could thing, “it can’t be that bad.”
My apartment looked down onto what could have been a lovely courtyard, created by closing down the through streets. Sometimes on late nights I’d hear chatter or a commotion and look down to see an African American cross dressing hooker trying to get some “work”. Sometimes she just talked out loud to herself. She was obviously a drug user or a methadone “patient”. On other nights I’d see an older woman–what looked like a grandmother who had her grandson living with her–drunk and stumbling around, also talking to herself. I’d seen them coming and going from my building.
When I saw these two would-be hallucinations meeting in said courtyard, I witnessed a battle so severe I swallowed my gum. The grandma was drunk and looking for a fight. And the hooker was tripping on something and wanted no part of granny, but when she was pushed too far–literally–the two got into a tussle, skirmishing back and forth–as her grandson watched, by the way, holding her purse. It was so ludicrous I was riveted. It was like watching dogs attacking, fighting, then moving back into their respective corners to recoup before lunging again. They were both speaking and yelling incoherently. Maybe they’d missed their appointments at the methadone clinic that day. But it was epic, and is ever etched in my memory in the year I served spent living in Uptown. It was a “perfect storm,” of sorts. And it never happened again. (Sometimes I wonder if it happened at all.)
The year turned out be somewhat of a character builder for me. It was humbling to get off on the piss-ridden L stop and walk down Wilson Avenue, trying to look disinterested and unaffected by the impressive host of crazies that surrounded me. In spite of the skirmishes, missing mail, random noises at all hours of the day and night, as it turned out Kathy was right. That year flew by and before I knew it I was packing up and leaving dangling-cigarette-lady for a much nicer place back in Lakeview.
I took a walk by the building recently–my first time since August of 1997. The whole area looks and feels the same. It was a gray day when I stopped by, which was appropriate. It felt like a gray year when I lived there. Aside from some gentrification creeping up around the area, the building, the court yard–much of it–looked the same.
It was a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want t live there…again.
