A scene from Hyde Park

It's Valentine’s day in the cold, cold world. Yep. Having a sad day. I am underrating massively, of course. My Sad like having a black train rolling though my spine and crushing all goodness and hope. Im a bit of a depressive, but I’m fighting it and I win most of the time.

After two cups coffee, the first line of defense against depression, I went outside to go to work and immediately felt better. I had expected to be bitch-slapped by the cold, but the seeming mildness of the 30 degrees made me feel pretty manly and butch! I was acclimating! ?Quien es mas macho?

Walking to work and past my neighbors I scored no points. One point is when they look at me when I pass. Two points is a nod or a smile. Three points is an actual word or two. From 47th to 55th, I ran in Love. The tennis kind of love. The zero points kind of love. I have been getting a little bitter about my frequent low scoring , which admittedly, is easy for a man burdened by the black dog of depression. And I can understand why folks would be suspicious about the only white face in the neighborhood. My people have had a shitty past, after all. And if our
places were reversed, if I saw a person walking about looking all singular. . .well shit, actually I couldn’t say.

Where I come from, most of the city is pretty mixed. Even in the most polarized of ‘hoods, there is not the absolute white-out like you find in Chicago, so the concept of one face in a sea of it’s opposites is completely alien. If it did happen to me, I would go out of my way to include that ‘other’. Which is partly motivated by white guilt and also by being an experienced outsider and the child of one. After being walked by and left, it’s hard to just walk by. I can’t stand to see a person be ostracized, until absolutely necessary.

I guess that’s true of all who have felt the ostrakon’s stony sting upon our face and bodies. Playing my own devil’s advocate brings me back to my reality, which is not the reality for any of my neighbors. Of course these folks are suspicious. They should be. I picture the conversation between black women on the bus, after I leave the bus smiling and saying hi to them.

BETTY
Who the hell is that white guy to be walking all around and shit.
BERNICE
Has to be a mistake.
BETTY
That gotts be true. And if he’s here on purpose that’s worse.Why is he here? What’s he wanting from us? Prolly some offay egghead doing some kind of sociological experiment. Well this ain’t no Tuskegee. I ain’t going to give up my DNA or any other letters I can tell you that right now. Just look at him, walking around and smiling all the damn time. Like that’s gonna make me say Oh! Hi! Welcome to the neighborhood! Come into my house and breathe my air and eat my damn food. I work too hard the put bread on my table to just give it all away to some white dude.
BERNICE
MMm Hm. A smile will let the devil in.
BETTY
That’s so true it ought to be tattoo’d on Barack Obama’s face.
BERNICE
Man, he fine.
BETTY
I don’t know what you see in him
BERNICE
If you don’t know I can’t tell you
BETTY
‘side, he’s practically white himself.
BERNICE
Practically still ain’t.
BETTY
Mm hhmm.
BERNICE
I know he is black enough to be sad about Whitney.
BETTY
Oh, girl, don’t, I barely got to stop crying about that this morning.
BERNICE
Well you know white folks don’t get it. I don’t get it how they don’t get it, but they don’t.
BETTY
Oh, girl, Whitney!
BERNICE
How can a person be so damn different like that?
BETTY
She sang like she was just breathing, like it was just leaking out. So beautiful.
BERNICE
I mean I understand not liking Michael Jackson. . .
BETTY
Oh, Michael made it hard to like him.
BERNICE
He did. . .but Whitney? Ain’t no comparison? Makes me mad.
BETTY
Mad?
BERNICE
Yeah, Betty,I said mad. I’m having trouble forgiving white folk about it too.
BETTY
What!?
BERNICE
What?
BETTY
Girl, you work with Buddhists.
BERNICE
Yeah.
BETTY
You work with republicans.
BERNICE
Yeah.
BETTY
You work with lawyers.
BERNICE
Yeah.
BETTY
Girl, you even work with that pale bitch that calls herself a witch.
BERNICE
Oh, Rhiannon just playin’ , she don’t mean it.
BETTY
But I’m sayin’ that all that you got no problems with. Those people got different morals, different politics, different Gods and one of them even got a different color sky I don’t care what you
say about Rhia-whatever, and it’s Whitney that gets your goat?
BERNICE
Yeah. I guess that’ s what I saying.
BETTY
That’s kinda messed up. And I agree with you completely. What up with that.
BERNICE
She real.
BETTY
Mhm?
BERNICE
Whitney was real. All that other shit people like or don’t, politics and what-all, that shit just window dressing; curtains to make the messed up world look a little less messed up.
BETTY
That’s some deep shit.
BERNICE
Is it? Didn’t mean it to be.
BETTY
That’s prolly why it came out right. Whenever people try to be deep it comes out like buullshit.
BERNICE
Well, I don’t know about that, I just don’t mind disagreeing about the little stuff. But Whitney, girl, don’t nobody better dis-remember her.
BETTY
Makes sense to me.
BERNICE
I know it does.
BETTY
I bet that white boy don’t get it.
BERNICE
Girl, I know he don’t.
BETTY
And it would be weird if it did.

The dialogue in my head faded away after that. I hope it’s close to real. That’s all a combo of what I saw with my head and heart, and then squeezed through the funnel of my pen. Let me know how this all plays in the theater of your mind. I did actually hear the phrase ‘a smile lets the devil in’ in a conversation between two so-called African American women on a bus.
I’m gonna keep smiling though, and hope they don’t see my devil in it.

The Green Line

My roommate would be surprised that it does not bother me to be the only white face on the bus. He is a tall black man, a good Christian and a business minded entrepreneur. I need to tell you he is black, because I am white, and I am living in a black Chicago neighborhood.

Is that racist?

It’s the Northern part of Hyde Park, which makes me a Sox fan and a Green Line rider. It has been interesting telling white Chicagoans I ride the green line and watching the eyebrows rise and face sprout the “Oh so do you know. . .”. Yeah, I know. I figured it out. As the Green Line train thundered south, the people on board slowly, stop by stop, grew more and more black. It became clear I was going to a. . . not a ghetto. . .not a hood. . .a black neighborhood. Was I afraid? Yes and no. I am from San Antonio Texas, whose population is heavily Latino. Often, on the bus, in a store, on the street I have been the only white guy. So I ain’t got that automatic drop-kick testicle shrinking fear from being around a lot of Melanin. But, This is a new city for me, and I might be going into a neighborhood . . .where. . . strangers aren’t welcome.

Is that racist?

I walked the whole way from the train stop to the address given. It’s a place of brownstones; lovely three to four story houses like I’ve seen in my dreams. There are some empty fields, some abandoned buildings and a lot of rebuilt and refurbished brownstones gleaming with the freshness of the recent stone work. And the farther I walked, the more frequent the shiny homes became. When I got to the address , it was the best looking apartment I had seen so far and close to several little chop suey shops and a grocery store. I knocked at the appointed hour, and a smiling man answered the door, with whom I felt comfortable with instantly. I wondered how he felt about me being white or if he had guessed. We had met obliquely on Craig’s list, so it could be either way.

I’m not going to ask, of course.

That would be racist.

We got along really well, and seemed to be at similar stages in our lives. Once confirmed we were both heterosexuals, the deal was pretty much set. The place is great, and when Mark showed me the view from the roof and I saw the skyline shrouded in winter’s hands, I would have paid him any amount to live there.

I moved in, and settled in the empty white room, and immediately had to go and get a head shot done. And this began the daily test of the Green Line. There’s a lot of black people at the Green Line. It has been casually hinted that there’s a few less at the Red line. The bus I take to get to the train goes to both, but the Green comes first. It’s a little more convenient, but a lot more black. I think about hanging on to the Red Line. Just about every time.

But. . .racist?

Something happened last night to make it all clear. I went to a Second City Show with a dear friend. A dear friend is a southern term which means it’s a member of another sex whom I have not had sex with nor do I intend to. The show was superb, and I will discuss that in the future, but I noticed and checked frequently that there was only one non-white face in the entire 150 person crowd. I had never seen that before. Ever. Back in San Antonio, ever crowd has at least
a few latino’s. I asked my friend and she confirmed that Comedy Improv seems to be a white thing.

I started to feel bad about it. I didn’t want the art of my love to be segregated. It bothered me the whole night and next day. I fought it, I didn’t want to accept that such a beautiful thing couldn’t appeal to black people. Then it hit me. Black music has a long tradition of improv in hip-hop and rap music. White folks have seen Eminem do it in Eight Mile. That’s big time Improv! Oh! I felt better immediately. It wasn’t that Comedic Improv was inherintly anti-black, it was that dramatic Improv was already a highly cultivated art form within the hip-hop music scene. They already had it covered!

So it’s not racist.

But everyday I’m gonna take the Green line test.

Chicago Prodigal

CHICAGO PRODIGAL

I am returned to Chicago, this City. A place I don’t want to gush about, like the better men and writers before me. I don’t want to sequalize either, sucking on the necks and hearts of the stories and legends of my culture. It is a shallow brew, a thin mixture to sip. We should be creating culture. Not squeezing its remains into a glass held by the shaking hand of man whose only identity is that tremor.


We are our own disease. We have been infested by the bacteria that once only polluted our veins. It is now all we are, how we refer and separate ourselves. It’s all about the support group. The cache of suffering. The celebrity of pain.


This is the land I tread, trod and jog on.

But this is not the city of Chicago.

I don’t know much about her yet. Hell, I just now saw here as a “ her”.

And you may disagree.



I came back to Chicago on Jan 31st. I left when I was a baby, so you can give me some credit for leaving against my will. I found it strange to discover that within a couple years of my birth, all of my family had moved from Chicago. And after about twenty years it is safe to say that any friends or acquaintences would be faded, dead or too different to deal with. As I sit here, I have not a single friend or family in the City of my birth. The hospital I was born in moved. I even looked up my parent’s old address, 922 West Montana. It no longer exists. There’s a newish looking building there now, and it bares the addresses of 920 and 924. 922 is gone.


So, as it is just lying around, I ‘ll go ahead and use it for a title.
Chicago had always been like OZ, I told myself when I was a kid. But I tended to make up most of the stuff I claimed to believe about myself. And no, that is not
healthy. It led to an Identity Crisis, a lot of wasted time and I wound hurting a lot of people who didn’t deserve it and almost destroyed myself.
It is accurate to say that i scaped myself down to one friend away from the grave or to the corner with a cup in my hand.


And look, I’m not going to lie here. I’ll tell the truth as it comes and takes the hits when y’all prove me wrong. All this stuff happened, and I really think this way. I’ll tell you what I think about this City, as I figure it out and try to resurrect my own life with it’s noble pulse.

My lie to myself about Chicago as Oz blistered up in my head when I walked past
the Oz Park tonight. And entire park dedicated to a movie. Not a General ,a
president or a benevolent rich bastard from the past, but a piece of entertainment. I stared at the statues of Dorothy and The Tinman, they were gravely captured, stentorian, jealous of those Generals they weren’t. But the point was valid. What if the park was dedicated to A Midsummer’s Night Dream by Shakespeare? I wouldn’t even have a glimmer of a snotty thought about it. I would be all gushy and how wonderful and how appropriate. But which work has
pleased people more? Has made more happiness?

Then in the middle of the playground I saw some teen boys filming themselves in
various death defying leaps. Jumping, bouncing and throwing themselves about and then rushing around the tiny little screen to see what it looked like. . . .for real.
Right next to them there was a basketball game going on in the dim light. Being from a small town,a big city basketball game has quite the cinematic flavor to it, it’s an icon, a sure sign of CITY. They were playing hard, swearing and boasting like I’ve read about in other guy’s stories about cities. That’s been a lot of my feelings lately. I am constantly turning the corner and seeing something beautiful, like in the movies, like on TV, but different as I am
choosing to be here, to live here. I seek to claim this city as mine, as it was when I came screaming into this world.

I won’t take the right to claim this place as my Hometown for granted. I am a writer, playwright and Improvisor, hence all these weird squiggles you are reading, and I want to show y’all. . .youse guys. . .what I can do. I feel childish, despite my 41 years, and enthusiastic beyond what my salt and pepper hair tells me to feel. And despite the lie my life was, I do like Mike Royko, red hots, having four seasons in a year. Not sure about the Cubs or White Sox issue yet, but the Blackhawks are my new team.


Can’t wait to meet you.

NEXT WEEK: ADVENTURES IN A CHICAGO HOSTEL!