Olympia and I played Raj our Mark Sanford tango for guitar and mandolin. We sang "You Are My Sunshine." I took the higher harmony. Raj and I retired to bed. After contemplating the world map tacked up over my bed, Raj noted with some alarm that Canada had many more islands than one would have thought. I slept intermittently and saw Olympia, who was staying up all night to catch an early-morning flight, peering into her laptop around 4 a.m. In the morning Raj and I dawdled until it was time to slowly pack up a pannier and take two bikes for a spin. The Cannondale touring bike got a flat on the rear tire as soon as we stepped out of the Jefferson Park el. I fixed it in front of a tacos al carbon shop. A friendly cabbage with a highly developed torso paused to offer suspiciously generous help. "There's a bike shop just two miles down the road. I can drive you there!" he said. We beamed back at him. He handed Raj a slip of paper that said "Jason, 312-[555-1212]," which Raj reported was the respectful thing to do, to hand the man in a male-female pair a telephone number to signal only neighborly helpfulness, not sexual availability. We biked sixteen miles to the botanic gardens, and ate sandwiches sitting by an artificial river. Raj could not contain his excitement for the vegetarian mixture of fixings: wheat toast, avocado, hummus, local cheddar, greens, tomatoes, mayonaise, mustard, honey, Sri Racha, pepper. I placed my two liter water bladder under my shirt and instructed Raj to pet it as if it were a roll of fat. We ranked nuts: Raj favored cashews; I chose macadamia; we agreed that almonds were top tier. After lunch, we toured "Fruit Island" and found robins' eggs nested in the branch of a trained fruit tree.
At the artificial pond, a toddler fed muffin crumbs to giant black koi whose pallid mouths broke the surface of the dark green water. Raj speculated that the mist from the fountain in the artificial pond was aerosolizing bacteria and feces for easy entry through our mucus membranes.
(This image comes up when you search for "aerosolized feces.")
We walked away from the water. We were unable to take the commuter rail home because ridership from the large street fair in Chicago had crowded out the bikes, so we gamely rode the sixteen miles back to Jefferson Park through clouds of gnats. An insect struck my right eyeball. We passed the miles by imagining ourselves biking in New York. Raj said mile six was going to Williamsburg and back. Mile five was "Hey, let's go to the Park Slope food co-op." Mile two was biking from the Village to the Empire State Building. We got seats on the #56 bus and were home by eight. For dinner we made the same sandwiches we had eaten for lunch, but Raj declared that the sandwiches that had spent an afternoon in the heat and compression of the pannier had been tastier. Raj forced me to eat radishes and pickles and a honey beer and then sprint two nauseating blocks to catch a bus along Chicago Avenue, which we just barely missed, so we watched the 11:45 pm showing of Up instead of the 11 pm showing of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. Perhaps it was just my exhaustion clogging up the warm-feelings valves in my body, but I forgot everything but the first fifteen minutes of the movie instantly. A cab driven by a lunatic—the second such ride Raj and I have endured in two weeks—bore us home along the legs of the triangle, rather than the hypotenuse, causing us to pay $(fare * √2).
In the morning, Raj called up his friend Anne from urban planning school and conveyed to her our intention to rent a car and drive it to Gary, Indiana, to the childhood home of Michael Jackson. Anne wanted to go, and offered to drive. Raj and I took the bus to her apartment and met her husband Gordon, a new professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. I knew instantly that I would like Anne because she had arranged a sofa so that a person seated on it would look out the window at the people in the high rises across the street. She also had a Trek 520 and later explained that she had biked across the country as a teenager. Gordon insisted that we eat extremely fresh strawberries before leaving. We bought white roses, peach-colored rose petals, and miniature cupcakes with red, white, and blue sprinkles at a nearby supermarket for the trip to Gary. Raj and Anne made precise and thoughtful observations about the built environment around us as we drove past it. There was a forty-foot tall alien inflatable attached to a building by the highway right at the Illinois-Indiana border; Anne suggested that this was the "Welcome to Indiana" alien. To me the road looked just like Taiwan. Maybe it was just because it was humid and overcast, and the roadside was overgrown with weeds.
We entered Gary at Broadway Street. Ninety percent of the storefronts we passed were empty. All were falling apart. One marquee above a closed theater read “JACKSON IVE TONIGHT.” It was unclear whether the letters had been up for thirty years, whether they were a recent memorial for Michael, or a prank. Anne slowed to a stop on the main thoroughfare to admire an old neon sign. Raj, who is from Detroit, said that the decay were seeing in Gary was worse than what he had seen in Detroit. Almost every other house on 23rd Street was abandoned (Anne said, “It’s beyond repair now, but what beautiful housing stock it must have been,” and sighed) but the ones that were not were tidy. The Jackson house was at the end of a road a stretch of which was a sidewalk on one side and only a weedy field on the other. It was apparently abandoned. The house was not more than thirty feet square.
It was hard to imagine Rebbie, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, La Toya, Marlon, Michael, Randy, Janet, Joe, and Katherine all squeezed into the space. There were a dozen fellow mourners. I had brought the American flag that I’d bought on election night in Grant Park. Only later, when Raj and I concluded that Barack Obama was the only person whose worldwide celebrity could grow as large as Michael’s, did I realize how pleasingly symmetrical was the journey of my star-spangled banner. We snapped photos of ourselves exhibiting a variety of moods inappropriate for the occasion.
Raj called this picture a “weird, fascinating conflation of patriotism, grief, and documentation.” Raj lay the flowers down. I spread the flower petals. I wrote a note to Michael on the only piece of paper in my backpack—a New Yorker reply form—and left it under a stuffed animal. I will say nothing about the contents of the note except that it was, upon later reflection, troublingly similar to what Barack Obama had written in the note he left on the Wailing Wall.
Others had left notes also, some heartfelt, some in different languages, some simply advertising unrelated services (“Nuñez Towing”). Mounds of stuffed animals and flowers were heaped up in front of the house. Somebody appeared not to have thought of the implications of putting a single glove on a stuffed monkey.
Across the street, a few people had set up a vendor tent to sell unattractive memorial t-shirts and DVDs. We pondered these. Raj said that the t-shirts only invited regret; he would regret spending the $20 to buy one, and he would also regret not buying one. I offered to buy him one. He declined. We left. Anne drove us along weedy single-lane roads to the Indiana Dunes, the south shore of Lake Michigan. She said that when the driveways became dominated by pick-up trucks, she knew that we were in the white part of Gary. We found an aquatorium structure and a statue of Octave Chanute that had been erected by The Society for the Restoration of the Gary Bathing Beach Aquatorium and Octave Chanute’s Place in History, Inc. All things around us were colorless under the overcast sky. Anne found a plastic doll with one arm and no head, and said, “This is the kind of thing you always find on beaches like this.” On the drive home, we stopped to buy a Fanta and a loser lottery ticket. We could find no place to buy food. It started pouring. Anne drove us home.
(Indiana Dunes, Lake Michigan.)
Raj and I watched episodes of 30 Rock until dinnertime and then, so moved by the ads we had seen, we went to Jewel/Osco to buy Jello chocolate pudding cups and pizza. My young gay Asian couple friends came over in the evening with board games. We closed all the windows to keep out the noise and then played Settlers of Catan and Modern Art as M-80s exploded loudly in the street. It was the Fourth of July. Derwin took ten minutes at the end of the evening to explain, in great detail, how a player could win Die Macher. They left. Raj and I stayed up until 3 a.m. taking turns showing each other our favorite Michael Jackson-related YouTube clips, including the videos for “Scream,” “Rhythm Nation,” “Rock With U” (Janet’s, not Michael’s).
On Sunday morning, Raj read aloud a passage from a book that described how the human population of Easter Island exhausted the island’s resources after several hundred years of habitation and then developed a culture of cannibalism. We went to the new modern wing of the Art Institute, where Raj’s art school friend worked the coat check. He got us in for free. Now I remember nothing about the art except for one very large photograph of an African-American woman in a floral print dress reclining on a floral print couch. Remembering one piece of art is my goal each time I go to a museum or gallery. The natural lighting of the new building was very pleasurable to walk through. Raj recalled a critic’s admiration for the “gradients of light.” From the museum, we took a bus to North Avenue and found a spot on the beach. I waded in the lake. I think my nipples broke off. Raj read Resilience Thinking and I read a magazine. We observed the sky and enjoyed the 5-15 minutes of sunshine that the breaks in the clouds afforded. Raj did not need to use the tinted ski goggles I had insisted he bring for reading in the glare. Attractively muscled boys in drooping shorts tossed balls all around us. I waited patiently for their shorts to fall off. Raj left to attend a pizza barbecue. When he came back to the apartment, we watched Dave Chappelle’s Rick James video. I showed him how Electronic Case Filing worked and told him about Monday’s notices of motion. Raj laughed and said that “motion” meant “bowel movement” for Indians. This gives me as much delight as the doodie element of negligence. He put a hand on his stomach, wagged his head and said something like “Notice of motion: I am having a loose motions” in his Indian accent. Raj left early Monday morning and I was not awake enough to remember his departure.
On Sunday, as we walked away from the beach, Raj asked whether I was happy about my decision to have lived in Chicago for a year. I said that the only possible answer I could give was yes, since it was unproductive and meaningless to validate regret. He wanted to know whether I had friends in the Bay Area; when I responded yes, he wanted to know the specific people I had in mind. I listed them. The way that he asked these questions and listened attentively and actively to my answers filled me with love and wonder. Love, for obvious reasons, and wonder because in my time of lonesomeness in the frigid Midwest I have sometimes forgotten what it feels like when someone pays attention. If I have any regret about living in Chicago, it is my choice to be far away from this. It is not so bad here now, of course, with the people and the weather. Still, thank you, friend, for the excellent weekend.
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