NATIVE CHICAGOAN (WEST SIDE)

The intersection of Ashland and Clybourn, Chicago

Morning

 

As I began my first ascent through the rows, my cardboard sign freshly unfolded, a woman called to me: "Congratulations!" She was a plain woman with short dark brown hair, glasses, and a pale complexion. She was driving a brown late eighties or early nineties Chevrolet. What impressed me about her was her eagerness to congratulate me. I saw her angling her neck toward me when I was still two car lengths away from her.

The very next trip up the columns of cars brought me to a brusque, tattooed, sunburned, smoking white man with a mustache, and bad hair. "You can't get a fuckin' job, man?" he asked. I began explaining myself to him a little and he asked, "then why are you carrying a fuckin' cardboard sign?" His voice was quiet. He came off as having a sort of familial concern. I got the impression that his bad language was more a matter of habit than of scorn.

Not too much later, as I was finishing another early loop, I saw something that made my heart drop. Walking along the sidewalk over the bridge was a single scruffy pedestrain. I recognized him immediately. It was the big Russian. What was he doing here now? I thought he was gone. The last time I saw him was over a year ago. But there he was. Robust and dark in a dirty blue shirt and shorts. I immediately folded my sign and walked to my waiting spot at the intersection. I leaned against the concrete fence, waiting for him. Was I going to have to leave? Quit?

As he came nearer to me, he reached between a couple of concrete rails in the fence, in about the place where I keep my water. But he pulled something else out instead. A worn, rumpled, cardboard sign. After picking up his sign, he just kept walking in my direction. He stopped when he reached me.

"You got a cigarette?" he asked. He was nowhere near as big as I'd thought he was. I figured he was at least five foot ten and thick. But he was about two inches shorter than me, and small, though solidly built.

"No, man. I don't."

"You from around here?" This question had nothing to do with my sign. He hadn't seen it. When he talked I saw he only had one long, brown front tooth. His accent was not Russian at all, but generic American street -- not particularly Chicago, or ethnic, or Southern, but somehow containing all three. His voice was rough and distant, but still clear.

"Yeah, I am," I answered.

After I said that, he nodded, and began to walk on.

"Hey," I stopped him. "Did you want to use this intersection?"

"No, that's okay," he answered, shaking his head. "You go ahead and work it. I wasn't going to work today, anyway. I'm just going to Fullerton. I just came to pick up my sign." As he talked, he looked past me and down. I tried to explain that I didn't really need the intersection the same way he did. As I talked, his tongue flopped over on its side and back in his half opened one-toothed mouth. He said I could stay.

"Thanks, man," I said, and he crossed the street. I watched him for a while as he ambled around looking for dropped cigarettes around the brown apartment building across Clybourn.

Later, a white man in a white contracting van stopped me. "What is that about?" he asked in a tinny Chicago accent, referring to my sign. He was dressed in white, as was his passenger. He was wearing a white painter's hat. I told him it was where I was from. We went back and forth for a bit with him telling me I'm looking for money, me telling him I wasn't, him asking what I wanted then, me begrudgingly telling him for people to think, and finally with him driving off saying I'm too young a kid to be walking around with a cardboard sign, and that I should go out and do something in the world. The whole time, his 20-something tall, long-headed passenger, sporting a neat brown buzz-cut stared at me inquisitively with squinted eyes and wide-open mouth.

 

 

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