Riders Block IV

DAY 4

Chicago, IL

 

I wake early, around seven thirty, to get a move on and try and beat the traffic headed southbound for the city.  I am slightly hung over but not enough to effect my motivation to get back to Chicago as quickly as possible.  I say goodbye to my cousins and walk out into the continuing brutality of heat and humidity.  It is already seventy degrees at eight o’clock and obviously is only going to get hotter.

I make it to Chicago in one hour, missing the traffic entirely, so obviously my plan that I had fretted over the whole day before has worked out.  It is only nine thirty and I am sure that Jack and the rest of his house are still asleep so I have coffee and make a few phone calls to my parents.  When Jack lets me up, the house is bustling because his roommate Chris is moving to Colorado on Tuesday and his parents have come to load up their van with his stuff.  Chris dismantles a futon that Danny had slept on the night before and takes the television and several other items.  Jack is obviously disturbed by the amount of furniture and décor being removed so abruptly, but says nothing.

Soon Jack’s girlfriend Nicole comes bringing with her another Dan, this one her brother, bringing the total of Dan’s to three out of six total people.  We head out around noon to eat brunch, the second time in as many days, and have to wait in a bar while they clear a space for our big party.  It is an odd experience being in a grungy, dive bar during the day.  Everything inside is black and concrete and cold and the only illumination is the sunlight streaming through the dirty windows.  It is an unsettling experience.

After brunch we decide to go to Montrose Beach instead of going to the White Sox game like we had planned.  I was a little pissed off at first, seeing as this was one of the things I had wanted to do when coming to Chicago, but the beach sounded nice on a day when I am sweating bullets in the air conditioning.  We drive in Nicole’s car to the beach and end up sitting in an endless line of traffic and once we arrive, the beach’s parking lot is completely full.  The place Jack described as “low-key” and “not crowded” is a mad house.  We leave before we get stuck in the line of cars just trying to escape the full parking lot and head to a local pool to cool off.  The idea of swimming in a communal pool in a city sounds disgusting to me but when we arrive it is actually quite nice and clean.

The water is amazingly refreshing but we aren’t in it long before a grey cloud rolls overhead and we begin to hear thunder crashing.  The lifeguards empty the pool and clear the deck in a frenzy only to see the clouds pass and the sun come back out.  Jack’s girlfriend leaves us in our wet bathing suits and takes her car home because she needs to get ready for a trip so we have to take the bus home in our wet suits.  This also manages to rub me the wrong way (pun intended) but the bus ride is short and I soon get home and shower.

For dinner we head to a pizza place where our friend Lindsey used to work when she lived in town.  The restaurant is also a brewery and it is absolutely packed.  Jack apologizes for bringing me to obviously the busiest places in the city and assures me it is not usually like this and that he has underestimated the spillover from the crowds at Lollapalooza.  The wait is about thirty minutes so we drink free beer because Jack knows the bartender and watch the Yankees finish sweeping the Red Sox into oblivion, six and a half games out of first place (I won’t even bother going into my frustration over this).  We order a deluxe pizza with jalapenos, feta, onions, sausage and spinach and between us we are able to murder the whole thing.  The jalapenos are spicier than I give them credit for but after the initial uncomfortable sensation, they do manage to cool me down.

Jack’s friend Allison, who is also taking a cross-country trip, turns up in Chicago for only one night and she and her siblings are in the Signature Room on the 95^th floor of the John Hancock building.  We hop a bus and take the elevator up and find Allison and her brother and sister and their friend at a table drinking overpriced cocktails.  The view is obviously spectacular and I feel out of place in the swanky atmosphere but it is nice to feel like a big shot so high above the city.  Allison is driving to California with her siblings and they have not slept in a proper bed since leaving Andover, MA the night before.  I had met Allison last Thanksgiving at a party in Boston and as one of Jack’s friends described her, she looks like a hot alien. 

We hang out until around twelve thirty until it becomes obvious that the waitress either wants us to order lots more drinks or leave.  The one consistent thing about my trip to Chicago is that in every restaurant I have been in, all our waitresses have been exceptionally beautiful.  It has become an expectation now, after five consecutive times that I should be served by hot women every time I come to the windy city, and if I cannot count on this than all will be lost.  We part with Allison and family as they head north to do more drinking and Jack and I go back to Division Street as Jack has work the next morning.