Riders Block V

DAY 5

Chicago, IL

 

The night is hotter than I can handle and at seven thirty when Jack leaves for work the sun is streaming through the window onto me.  I manage to fall back to sleep after Jack wakes me up to give me his apartment keys and explain to me which each one does, and I wake up around nine thirty, sweating and thirsty beyond belief.  I have some water and then walk to get some coffee at the cake bakery where I have been going for the past few days.  When I decide to head downtown it is almost twelve o’clock and the sun and heat are back to make it another unbearably hot day in the Midwest. 

I take the blue line El downtown to the Loop and get off near the Chicago Institute of Art.  Jack told me they had just opened a new Modern Wing and that he had yet to check it out.  I had previously been to the science museum and one other museum in Chicago and they had all been great so I was looking forward to this one as well.  The grand marble building was very crowded and expensive but walking around in the air conditioning for a few hours was worth every penny of the eighteen dollars.  At first I started to wander around aimlessly, soon realizing that if I didn’t eat something I wasn’t going to be able to appreciate the art at all, no matter what it was.

In the surprisingly low-priced museum café I buy and sandwich and roll and pasta salad and get only one bite deep into the sandwich and realize I can’t eat it.  The mustard that I instructed the sandwich maker to put on the bread, which looked like regular yellow mustard, must have been flavored with horseradish because when I bite into it the unmistakable taste of wasabi fills my mouth.  Since real wasabi is a swamp root native only to Japan, when we make it in this and ever other country in the world, we use horseradish as a substitute.  Wasabi being one of my least favorite tastes in the world, I deem the sandwich inedible, but manage to peal off the bread that has the mustard on it and it enjoy the rest as an open face sandwich.

I return to the museum and walk around some more, heading to the Modern Wing after a long trip through the labyrinthine trip to the café.  The new wing is three stories tall and the exhibits get better the higher up one goes.  The bottom floor is filled eyesores trying to pass as contemporary art and I immediately begin to doubt the validity of this new addition to the museum.  On the second floor there are more interesting works: one of the most memorable is sections of the New York Times from September 12 and 13 of 2001, right after the world trade center attacks, that have been framed and drawings of a man and woman in sexual embrace have been colored over the articles.  Another memorable exhibit is called Clown Torture and is a video loop of a screaming man in full clown costume, which, needless to say, is highly disturbing.  The third floor has even more interesting photographs and paintings so overall the new wing is certainly worth seeing.

I mill around through the main museum exhibits; one on Japanese screen paintings the other on paintings and artifacts having to do with wine over the past thousand or so years, and leave around two o’clock.  I take the red line subway to Addison and walk to Wrigley Field to see if there is a tour of the park.  The Cubs are in Colorado and since my plans to see baseball in Chicago had been thwarted, I settled for taking a walk around the second oldest ballpark in the country.  The tour started at two thirty and we sit at the beginning in the bleachers above the right field ivy, the sun beating down on us.  I watch a cloud shaped like the island of Great Britain make its way towards the sun and for a blissful three minutes we are cooled by shade, only to see the cloud finally pass and heat resume.  The stadium is impressive, not in the shrine-like sense that the tour guides would have you believe, but is still a work of art.  We travel around the inside up to the press box and the suites and then down to the team’s clubhouse and out into their dugout and onto the field.  It was the first time I had walked on the field of a major league park and it is quite a unique experience.

The Cubs play the fewest number of night games at home than any other team in the majors.  They only play twenty or so games in the evening in Chicago and the first game to start at Wrigley after three in the afternoon was in 1988.  To put this in perspective, the first major league game under the lights was played in Iowa in 1930 and now almost every game is played at seven o’clock.  The reason the Cubs play so early is because the outfield wall is so low that houses built before the stadium look into the ballpark and the occupants did not want late games being played when they had to sleep or wanted to put their children to bed.  This is also why most of these houses have built bleachers on the roofs of their buildings so they can sit and watch any game they want for free (or sell tickets for a profit, a percentage of which goes to Cubs management).

I take the bus back to Jack’s place around four thirty and get off at the wrong stop and end up having to walk over a mile to his apartment.  When he gets home, his roommates and I and one of their sisters go out to eat a block away from their place.  It is Jack’s roommate Chris’s last night in town so his sister and the three of us have wings to celebrate.  My streak of hot waitresses continues that evening and so the legend grows even more.  After dinner we hang out with Chris for a while but then we all go to bed pretty early.  This night has the same unmistakably hot qualities as the previous evenings but I am so tired from walking in the sun all day that I fall asleep quickly.