Sleeping Around (13 page)

I came up out of Jackson station and all around me the city's workforce was streaming in and out of the ‘L' trains and swarming away along a dank State Street underneath the bulky steel elevated train line. It was all eerily familiar, but there was something missing. Ahh, that was it. There were no high-speed car chases or cops having shoot-outs with nasty crime gangs. Pity, really.

It was only a five-minute ride along to my first foray into a life of crime as an ID fraudster. Still, even with the prospect of a prison sentence hanging over my head, I was looking forward to visiting the Art Institute of Chicago. Being a devoted habitué of art galleries and a great admirer of the French Impressionists, I knew that it housed the largest collection of French Impressionists outside the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Plus it would get me out of the rain.

‘Hey dude, I'm a teacher,' I blurted out as I flashed Bob's card to the young hipster behind the ticket desk.

What was I saying? No normal person says ‘dude'.

‘There you go, dude,' he said as he handed me my ticket.

Seeing paintings in the flesh after studying them in books for years is like meeting your favourite Hollywood star face-to-face. The Art Institute of Chicago is full of ‘celebrity' paintings including
A Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte
by Georges Seurat; Van Gogh's
Bedroom in Arles
and
Self-portrait, 1887
; Grant Wood's
American Gothic
; and more than 30 paintings by Monet. There weren't nearly enough famous paintings for some people, though. An old lady tottered up next to me while I was admiring a Pissarro painting and she said to her friend, ‘Is this famous?'

‘No,' said her friend.

The old lady, who didn't even bother looking at the painting, then said, ‘Can you tell me when we get to a famous one?'

I wandered around for three hours and what amazed me the most was that not a single person even batted an eyelid at the fact that I was waltzing around cradling a bicycle seat. I soon discovered, however, that Bob wasn't being paranoid after all and that someone was going to be in for a mighty surprise when they went to ride their bicycle home. All that was left of the bike that had been chained next to mine was the frame, which was the only thing secured to the bike rack. Both wheels were gone. And so was the seat.

Next stop was the third-tallest building in the world—the 110-storey Sears Tower had been the tallest building in the world until 1996, when it was usurped. At least it was easy to find. The third-tallest building on earth is always there, wherever you look. Telescopic in design, its square shoulders fall away at certain points, relieving the monotony of its huge black surface. It's amazing to think that this immense, hi-tech building was built as a monument to the old-fashioned mail-order business that brought anvils, gravestones, wigs, steam engines, girdles and entire kit-houses into people's homes across America.

From the 103rd-floor Skydeck, Lake Michigan looked like an ocean and the city's vast grid of streets were as plain as a map with little silver glints of river and canal, and tiny toy railroads snaking away to the prairies. The other giants of the skyscraper world looked tiny in comparison—including the John Hancock building, which, at 100 storeys, is no skyscraping slouch. Then my absorption in the newfangled world of steel and glass was interrupted by the oldfangled world of straw hats and white bonnets. A family of Amish folk were wandering around the Skydeck looking totally dumbfounded, eyes wide open with childish wonder. The men had Abraham Lincolnesque long pointy beards and bowl haircuts, while the women—all of the women—were wearing aprons. Both the men's and the women's clothes were held together by pins. I'd seen the film
Witness
, so I knew that they couldn't use buttons because they are deemed a ‘modern convenience'. It seems soap and deodorant are also deemed a modern convenience, because boy oh boy did they smell. This family may well have scorned buttons and soap, but there was one modern convenience they were more than happy to fully embrace. Dad was slurping on a McDonalds thick shake while the kids were fighting over a bag of McNuggets and fries.

Bob told me that it would take 30 minutes to ride back to his place. It took me more than an hour. But that was because the grid layout of the city was so ridiculously easy to follow that I somehow managed to get lost. When I got back Bob was already home from school and busily pulling apart a bike in his ‘workshop'. ‘I do most of my bike repairs here,' Bob said as he sipped a beer. He certainly had plenty of space. Bob's workshop was out the front of the apartment on the footpath. Sorry, in America it's a sidewalk. Or a pavement if you're English. I love the fact that even though Americans, English and Australians speak the same language we can have three different names for the same thing.

When I came back from the dunny, I mean the loo, I mean the john, Bob was chatting to his ‘friend' Bruce, who went to the liquor store at the same time every day to buy his two cans of beer. ‘All the drunks in the area know me,' Bob said, ‘because they pass me on the way to the liquor shop.' Most of Bob's ‘friends' were, as Bob called them, ‘black dudes'.

‘They love me,' Bob grinned. ‘Because I chat to them and buy them a beer now and again.'

‘Hey Bob, you got a dollar?'

This was Robert who, according to Bruce, was ‘as old as shit' and ‘as dumb as shit'. Robert did look a bit worse for wear. ‘See his fingers?' Bruce chuckled, pointing to Robert's lack of fingers on one hand. ‘He got 'em stuck to a pole.' Robert had flaked out drunk on the street one night in the middle of the bitterly cold Chicago winter and had tried to get up by grabbing a pole. His hand froze against the post and three fingers had to be amputated to get him off.

I asked Bob to take me to an authentic Chicagoan restaurant for dinner, so we got in his truck and drove to Azteca Tacos Restaurant in Little Mexico. It was at least very authentic Mexican. The restaurant was hot and steamy and the tables and chairs were cheap and tatty. Bob ordered in Spanish. ‘No one speaks English here,' he shrugged. We were served enough food for four people—or the immense lady who was the only other diner. As we gorged on homemade guacamole and corn chips, beans, rice, fajitas and an entire fish cooked in lime juice, I asked Bob about Chicago's notorious crime rate.

‘We're currently ranked number three for murders,' Bob said proudly. ‘After Miami and Orlando.'

Chicago did make it to number one in 2001, Bob told me, but the mayor wasn't happy so he demanded that there be a recount on the basis that the 9/11 deaths should have been included in the New York figures.

‘Are there many gangs around this area?' I asked Bob.

‘A few, but Southside is where most of the crazy-ass ghetto motherfuckers are.'

After dinner we drove back to Bob's, jumped on the bikes and went for a ride to see some crazy-ass ghetto motherfuckers. Southside is the ‘The Black Metropolis' of Chicago and, with an African–American population of around 90 per cent, a couple of whiteys on pushbikes stood out somewhat. It also became quite obvious that we were entering a dodgy part of town. Monstrous concrete housing blocks covered in graffiti loomed over streets littered with abandoned cars, old refrigerators and burnt-out couches.

There was some serious loitering going on, including kids walking in the middle of the busy road while cars swerved around them. ‘They've got such a shitty life,' Bob explained. ‘That walking on the road is just a way of saying “fuck you” to everyone.' Most of the kids were doing the whole hip-hop look, i.e. they looked as if they were wearing their older (and much larger) brother's clothes.

‘Don't look at them,' Bob said gravely. ‘And whatever you do, don't stop!'

‘Is it safe?' I asked warily.

‘Not really. Friends say I'm crazy riding through here,' Bob said matter-of-factly. ‘I had a bottle thrown at me once.'

I stared at Bob in dismay.

‘They've got those now, though.' Bob pointed to a pole on the corner with a blue flashing light on top. The flashing poles were set up on just about every corner and Bob explained that these recently installed anti-crime cameras were capable of pinpointing gunshot sounds, calculating where the shots were fired, and pointing and zooming the cameras in the direction of the shots within a two-block radius. That's all very well, I thought, but all it meant was that the police would get some nice footage of a bullet passing through my head.

When we got back, I finally met Bob's flatmate Carl, who was an African–American but not, Bob assured me, a crazy-ass ghetto motherfucker. Carl was heading out to a friend's buck's party. ‘We don't call it that!' Carl chuckled. ‘We call it a bachelor party. A buck in America is a BIGGGG black man!'

I felt a little guilty about appropriating the couch when Carl told me that his good friend Chuck from out of town was also staying the night. ‘It's okay, he'll sleep on the Lazy Boy,' Carl shrugged.

Carl wobbled in at three in the morning with a tottering Chuck in tow. I offered Carl's friend the much more commodious couch because Chuck was one hell of a buck. He was about twice the size of the Lazy Boy lounger. He declined my offer, but although he had to lie on a 45-degree angle with his feet dangling off the end, he looked surprisingly comfortable. If Chuck had actually remembered his night's sleep, he'd probably have given the Lazy Boy a good score on LazyBoySurfing.com. Chuck's snooze did, however, have a knock-on effect on the below-average score I gave Bob's couch:

Couch rating: 7½/10
Pro: Bob's long and capacious couch
Con: Chuck's long and cacophonous snoring

Everything in America is big. I spent most of the day surrounded by immensity. In the morning I went to a colossal laundromat where huge black ladies were throwing enormous pairs of underpants into gargantuan washing machines. The laundromat had 82 washing machines and 68 dryers (I was a little bored, so I counted them all). There were also six large-screen televisions playing former super-sized and now super-rich Oprah.

After washing my normal-sized underpants I rode into town to the Field Museum of Natural History, which was so big that I spent three hours wandering around before I even got out of the stuffed-birds-in-glass-cases section. The museum has 6 acres of display area and more than 20 million exhibits. Besides 65-million-year-old Sue, ‘The biggest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found', which was in the entrance foyer of the museum, all I saw were lots of blue-footed boobys, duck-billed flibbets and an impressive bugeranus.

After the birds I only had enough time to quickly stampede through the jungles of Africa and skip around the totem poles of Native America, because I was meeting Bob for a beer by the shore of Lake Michigan. We met at the front of the Adler Planetarium, which was easy to locate with its domed roof bulging like a blister on a fingertip at the end of a peninsula reaching into the lake.

Getting down to the shore wasn't so easy, though. A belting wind coming off the lake kept forcing us back. The eye-watering gale was so strong that it was creating 2-metre high waves on the lake. When I could actually see through my teary eyes, the view was spectacular. Ranks of huge, granite skyscrapers soared skywards and towered over Lake Michigan, which stretched out steel-grey and steel-cold like a Chicago skyscraper turned on its side.

It was taking all my strength to stay upright against the buffeting wind. ‘This is great, isn't it?' Bob squealed over the shrieking wind. Even the beer in my can was swirling around as if in a storm.

‘Yeah, fantastic,' I hollered back.

We lasted three minutes before we gave up and jumped back on the bikes.

Bob rode like a maniac through the Gotham-like business district, weaving in and out of traffic, nipping in front of buses and playing chicken with taxis. We zoomed past the gleaming-white Wrigley Building (as in the chewing gum company), zipped past the oddly striking
Tribune
building and broke the two-minute mile down the Magnificent Mile, which glittered like most places where great wealth is spent and displayed.

By the time we reached the John Hancock building, I had learnt three important facts: Chicago's name comes from a local Indian language meaning ‘skunk', Chicago produced the world's first pinball machine, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a Chicago native because a copywriter from a local department store created him for one of its promotions.

We made our way up to the Observatory Bar on the 94th floor of the John Hancock Building, but we didn't stay long. Bob, sounding very much like Jake Elwood, said: ‘We're not staying here. The fuckin' beers are ten dollars!'

On the way home to Bob's we stopped at a super-sized supermarket so I could buy the ingredients to make a risotto. I certainly knew I was in America when we walked down an entire aisle devoted to Jell-O.