I never experienced the reality of Winter until I moved to Chicago. I’d seen a birdbath freeze solid in Arkansas and passed through dark and snowy versions of New York and New Jersey but it wasn’t a reality I had actually lived with. It must have been toward the end of 1999 and I was waiting for the Fullerton bus to go sell furniture when I touched my hair and was surprised to find it hard and sculpted. I had only ever used styling gel for a tiny second in Junior High School when I was trying to overcompensate to fit in before Grunge and Alternative kicked in and the Thrift Store clothes I had grown up in and been mercilessly teased for wearing suddenly became cool.
It took a solid minute of probing around my scalp to get to the bottom of the mystery: I had run out of the apartment with my hair still wet from a shower and it had frozen into place in that post-shampoo pompadour.
I’m just saying that a lot of the things people from colder climes know instinctually were only introduced to me through trial and error as a young adult. That if you put cold hands into neoprene gloves the only thing they’ll do is keep them cold like a thermos that can hold both chilled cocktails and warm coffee. That if you are walking along North Avenue for several miles your face will freeze into place like a setting papier-mâché mask multiple times and you’ll need to step into convenience stores and wait for it to thaw.
That the end of a year feels like the end of the world and you’ll get depressed and cry and imagine yourself in a dark landscape full of wolves and fire until it one day miraculously starts being Spring again and that doesn’t happen until way after January First.
It was probably all January: the overdose, the cops kicking our walls down and the orgy of destruction that finally forced the slumlord that all our older peers described as really nice to kick us out.
We never had a mirror in the enclosed bathroom but somewhere near the end we had a gigantic hole in the shoddily constructed wall. I was shaving for work when Dave came over and stuck his head through the gap while pointing to any little areas I might have missed on the corresponding sections of his face:
“Look, I’m Nico! I’ll be your mirror…“
The tiny little bathroom became an epicenter of destruction. Somebody had tried to hang themselves and brought down an entire section of the office building style drop ceiling. Eventually both the sink and toilet were also smashed when somebody went on a drunken rampage using one of those retractable belt divider things from the front of night clubs as a sledgehammer.
The kind with concrete on the bottom to weigh it down. It’s kind of impressive that whoever it was got up the strength to swing it like that.
This next part was captured on video with Jamie’s Hi-8 camcorder and became as popular in the last days television lounge as Justin One’s exotic pornography selections and a VHS tape full of 1980’s era regional commercials we discovered after Suzy Poling showed up and got us stoned.
John and Jamie are drinking together when John misplaces his cigarettes. When he fails to find them he starts swinging around a leftover cane or crutch from somebody’s foot injury. Jamie is egging him on:
“Where’s John’s cigarettes? Where’s John’s cigarettes?”
John hooks his weapon into the corner of a fluorescent light fixture and wrenches it from the ceiling. Jamie has just enough time to scream “they’re not in the ceiling!” before the object comes crashing onto John’s head and knocks him from his feet in a shower of sparks and the surging light of exploding illuminated fluorescent tube bulbs. Somewhere in the chaos somebody identifies the situation as a medical emergency and takes John to an Emergency Room.
He came back with staples in his scalp and I joked that he was so much of a stupid hipster that he was physically becoming a zine.
Ray, our Cosby Sweater wearing Eastern European landlord, and his maintenance guy Arturo never really “got” us but at this point things got dialed up to open contempt. We were all evicted effective more or less immediately and the hostility began to be felt at Congress Theater events. Arturo glared at anybody who had ever been seen in El Rancho while operating a popcorn machine at the Fugazi show. By August I had just walked into Ladyfest Midwest Chicago when Ray spotted me (the curse of being 6’5”) and angrily pulled me from the crowd:
“You don’t come in here! You are garbage! You pay fifteen dollars to come in? Here’s fifteen dollars to leave!”
He paid me from his own pocket and assembled the entire security staff so they would recognize me on sight. Fortunately I had lived in the building long enough to be familiar with some more esoteric stage doors and was able to slip back in to see my new favorite band: The Need. They were selling merch on the sidewalk out front to avoid having to give a cut to the venue and I was filling out my collection and probably gushing when I caught the eye of Denver’s Rainbow Sugar.
They must have recognized me from the descriptions provided by Nate and Josh from Friends Forever. The excited buzz of the conversation caught the attention of venue security and I was ordered to stand at least 500 feet from the doors on the other side of Milwaukee Avenue. My final memory from El Rancho was being accosted by Arturo while peering through the front door to see if there’d been any visible improvements. We told him we “just wanted to see what it looks like”.
“What do you mean how it looks like?”, he fired back in the inimitable tones of actual hatred.
“It looks how you left it! Just like shit! Just like you!”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 