<niqui> i mean, those [dunkin’ donuts chocolate filled donuts] have got to be the single least healthy food item on the planet — even the KFC Double Down has some protein in it, somewhere, among all the fat — but i liked them
<twork> didn’t the KFC DD (hm, DD, coincidence?) actually test with less fat than, like, a whopper or something like that?
* twork remembers being surprised at some of the comparisons when it came out.
<niqui> http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20101018/double-down-kfc-101018/20101018/?hub=TorontoNewHome
<niqui> apparently less than a triple whopper with cheese
<nrose_kenedy> and pink donuts don’t taste like fake strawberry anymore, they just taste like pink
<wasy> there is a triple whopper?
* wasy *shudders* at the mention of pink donuts
<wasy> dammit. now /me wants donuts
<niqui> http://www.thatsfit.com/2010/04/21/kfc-double-down-is-better-for-you-than-salad/
<twork> ah, okay, well a triple whopper with cheese is bound to be hard to beat for fat content. that’s practically cheating.
* niqui kinda likes the pink donuts
<twork> mmmmm, cheating.
<niqui> i mean, i’m not going to go out and get one on my own
* twork wishes to cheat.
<niqui> if i go to DD to get a donut, it’s probably going to be either a ordinary glazed donut, or a blueberry cake donut (mmmm, fake blueberry).
<niqui> but the pink donuts are OK.
<niqui> …i kind of want to try a KFC double down now :(
* niqui looks guilty
* wasy has wanted one since the moment /me saw a picture
* niqui passes a KFC on her way home from school.
<niqui> i could get one on my way home tonight.
<wasy> where is there a kfc?
* twork remembers the last time /me went to a KFC, being sorely disappointed compared to KFC feeds of /me’s youth.
<niqui> on my way home FROM NUTRITION CLASS.
<wasy> ha
<niqui> kfc on south wabash just south of harrison. next to the dunkin’ donuts, of course!
<niqui> it’s a combo kfc/pizza slut, for the students.
<twork> once you’ve had Harold’s, it’s hard to go back to the colonel.
<niqui> !! our harold’s is closed!
<niqui> expired license.
<wasy> oh, right. /me has seen that place.
<wasy> !!!
* niqui saw the signs on the way home tuesday
* wasy feels the itis coming on just thinking about harold’s
* twork hasn’t had Harold’s in months. it may be time.
<niqui> if harold’s made a double down, that would be *epic*
<wasy> death
<wasy> that would be death
<niqui> i would die of a heart attack within minutes
<wasy> tasty, tasty death
<twork> but a good death.
<niqui> but i bet it would be *delicious*
<twork> you have to go somehow…
<nrose_kenedy> best. suicide. ever.

Of all the Amtrak trips I’ve taken, there are really only two stations that stand out in my mind: Washington DC Union Station, and Chicago’s Union Station. Texarkana is a room with a television in it; Flagstaff, Arizona has a room with a bench and a car rental desk. Atlanta and Bloomington/Normal are just anonymous waiting areas that could be confused for a Greyhound station; St. Louis actually is also a Greyhound station. The name of the game now is economy, for there are so few remaining passengers, and, outside of the Beltway routes that they use personally, Congress doesn’t see a point to rail transit. Why would anyone choose take a slow, bumpy train when airplanes are so much faster and more modern? Even a fan like me must admit that the golden age of rail transit is behind us, and there is no longer much reason to have a landmark building to send passengers to faraway places. But a few of these old grand buildings still stand, clinging on to their intended roles.

Daniel Burnham is a regular player in most stories about building Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is he who gets credit for the eponymous Burnham Plan, the 1909 “Plan of Chicago,” though it was co-written with another author; and it was he who forcefully drove the design of the 1893 World’s Fair, Chicago’s White City. Both of these projects are still in evidence today, 98 years after his death.

One of the six stated intentions of the Burnham Plan, the radical proposed redesign of the City of Chicago that was intended to provide for improved conditions of city life for all its people, was to improve the freight and passenger rail transport in the city. At the turn of the century, Chicago was a major rail hub, for both freight and passenger traffic. Everyone knows that, but what is less well known is that it wasn’t entirely by happenstance. There was no magical confluence of population and waterways and commodities that just meant that Chicago was clearly the only place a rail hub could develop. As is only right and just, given our traditions of civic governance, there were machinations involved to make this happen.

The first railroad in Chicago was chartered in 1836 and laying rail by the late 1840s, kicking off a mad rush to grant land and bring railroads in. Fifty years later, over twenty-two rail companies served Chicago, ferrying people, livestock, and goods in all directions. The independence of all these new rail companies meant that the train stations went where there happened to be room to put them, at the time. A passenger might arrive on an Illinois Central train at Chicago Central Station, at Roosevelt and Michigan, then have to walk over to Harrison and Wells to catch an outbound train at Chicago Grand Central Station. Scattered elsewhere throughout the Loop were Chicago Northwestern Station, La Salle Street station, Dearborn Station, and the first Union Station. They could have made it a little more decentralized, but they would have had to work at it.

The Burnham Plan proposed to consolidate these six passenger terminals into new multi-company complexes just to the south and to the west of the Loop. To this end, Daniel Burnham was commissioned to design the new Union Station. From Clinton Street on the west to the Chicago River on the east, Union Station sits between Jackson on the south and Adams to the north, bisected by Canal Street – two full city blocks. But Burnham never saw a train arrive at the station; he died thirteen years before its completion.

Burnham was a fan of the Beaux-Arts tradition, which was a neoclassical style that had originated in Paris. He was such a dedicated adherent that, after the 1893 World’s Fair, he invited another up-and-coming local architect to go to France and study at l’École des Beaux-Arts on his dime – luckily for the Prairie School, Frank Lloyd Wright declined. Undeterred by this, or by Louis Sullivan’s vocal discontent with the White City of the Fair, Burnham continued in this style and, when several railroads banded together to commission Chicago Union Station for their needs, this is the style he used for Union Station’s design.
The Great Hall of Union Station, a cavernous room nearly a full city block in size, is the crown jewel of the station. The exterior of the building is neoclassical Greco-Roman: tall, with a grand arcade at the entrance, fronted with massive columns. It is imposing, but not particularly stunning. That happens once you get inside.

Inside, the ceiling is lofted a hundred feet overhead, creating a huge echoing chamber topped by a skylight that bathes the room in light on a sunny day. Decorative fluted columns with elaborate capitals border the walls and entrances, and tall lamps with standards in the same elaborate style are dotted around the edges to provide light when the sun fails. Galleries, ideal for people-watching, surround the room on an upper story on three sides. And when it comes time to catch your train, your walk to the concourse is watched by two statues: one figure, holding a rooster, represents Day, and the other, with an owl, represents Night, and together they stand guard over rail travelers at all hours.

Entering the Great Hall from the entrances on Canal Street, one descends one of two Grand Staircases – everything is grand, at Union Station – into the huge waiting area, set with benches. This area is timeless: instead of seeing a commuter make her way down this Grand Staircase, step back and see a flapper instead, with cropped hair and a scandalously short dress, descending with high heels clicking on the steps, laughing and planning to hit a jazz club later that night. Or see a solemn man in uniform carrying a canvas duffel, on his way to France, Korea, or Viet Nam. Look at a family, and imagine them just arriving, carrying bags up the stairs instead of down – they could be some of the 7 million Black Americans who left the South in a Great Migration that began after World War I and continued until the 1970s, some half million of whom chose to remain here and create the Chicago of today.

Whoever you see in the Great Hall, see them walking. It’s not a place for sitting still. There’s no real need. Metra commuter trains operating out of Union Station don’t even require advance ticketing, so you can run through the station at the last minute and jump on before the doors close. Amtrak trains require buying a ticket in advance, but unlike airlines with tedious security checkpoints and required advance check-in times lest your overbooked seat be given away, arriving fifteen minutes before departure is plenty of time – as long as you have the time to get through this vast station and down the platform to your train in time, you’re good. Even though the Great Hall is for waiting, only a few people actually do so.

The dramatic architecture of the old Union Station is there, and has been there for 85 years, boldly stating that in Chicago, things are so great and so grand that we can go to these exaggerated lengths to create a dramatic theatre, just for any old person to spend a few minutes walking through. But the human drama taking place in the newer part of the station is no less impressive for its lack of splendor or its transience. The Concourse of Union Station, where passengers go to board their trains, is confusing and cacophonous. Metra commuters on autopilot head directly for their customary platforms, not even bothering to check the departures monitors to tell them where to go. Passengers just off an Amtrak train haul wheeled bags and luggage through the disorganized crowds, just trying to find someplace with a sign to tell them where they should go. Signage is in short supply in some areas, so the smart bet is to follow traffic that looks like it knows where it’s going, and hope they’re not heading for a train to Libertyville. Caught up in the current, sooner or later you’ll wash up on the concourse’s shore, and because we all know what you’ve just gone through, there’s a bar waiting to greet you with cheap beer on tap and, best of all, a clear route to the exit.

So, was Daniel Burnham’s goal, to simplify rail in Chicago, both worthy of his attention, and achieved through the design of Union Station? Arguably, no. While he could not have foreseen the fall of rail travel in the second half of the twentieth century, a fall which effectively wiped out the need for efficient intercity passenger handling in the Loop, he also could not force the hands of the railroads to join together under one roof in the first half of the century. Today, Union Station is the only intercity passenger rail station left in Chicago, but that is due to lack of demand; if Union Pacific decided tomorrow to start hauling in passengers from Wisconsin, it could just as easily terminate trains at Ogilvie. In fact, intercity service remained at the other terminals until traffic died down and the different railways got out of the passenger business.

Some of those terminals still remain, in various configurations: the original Northwestern Station, another neoclassical station, was demolished and replaced with a modern office tower, with Metra commuter rail service in the first-floor Ogilvie Transportation Center. La Salle Street Station takes commuters from the base of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange building to far-flung suburbs. Dearborn Station still stands, but its rails are gone; today, it’s a shopping center. Other stations are long since gone: Central Station remains in name only, as a tiny slice of a neighborhood between the Museum Campus and Lake Shore Drive to the east and the South Loop to its west, bordered by Indiana Avenue. And an empty lot sits next to the river at Harrison Street, where Grand Central Station was until it was demolished in 1971.

That said, I’ll throw my hat in on the side of success for Burnham. Because Union Station remains, and it still serves over fifty thousand passengers daily, shuttling them in to and out of the center of town. The Loop may or may not be the beating heart of Chicago, depending on where your geographical loyalties lie, but it’s certainly a close enough approximation, and it is fitting to greet people with such a fine reminder of why making grand plans is worthy, and how to do so still has the power to stir the heart of man, even a hundred years on.

I don’t think I’m very good at writing short stories — for starters, this is 3,462 words, which is roughly 2000 more than the assignment called for. So I missed on the “short” part, but it is technically still a story. Though I’m not convinced it’s much of one. But that’s okay, I’m not very practiced at writing fiction. As a matter of fact, I think the last time I wrote any fiction was one time like eight years ago I was goofing off and a friend was refusing to tell me why he dropped out of college, so I started writing this epic tale of battles on the quads with vicious squirrels terrorizing undergrads, and fires and explosions and, you know, all those good things that pretty much never actually happen in real life at the University of Chicago, except for the squirrels. I kind of wish I still had a copy of that one, actually, I remember it fairly fondly. Stupid jerkface transient medium of e-mail. SQUIRRELS ARE FUNNY! GIVE ME MY STORY BACK, MAGIC INTARWEBS!

…Ahem. Anyways. Without Further Ado, I present: “The Strange Case of the Goat and the Paperboy.”

“I heard it was a paperboy.” Bill reached under the bar and pulled a brown bottle out of the cooler, then slid it in my general direction.

I’d just come into the Billy Goat Tavern after kicking off from work a few minutes early. It was early May, raining out, and pretty chilly, and I’d felt like an alley rat, dripping and miserable-looking from just my short walk over from across the street. My coat and umbrella were dripping, from the seat on one side of mine. On the other side, my buddy Rick pulled up the stool next to me and plopped his enormous, awe-inspiring ass down on it. My mom always said if I ate my vegetables I’d grow up big and strong, but I don’t think she meant I should aim for that. Still, he managed to not look like he’d just been pulled out of the lake, and we’d walked over the same way, so maybe he did have something I didn’t. And that was when Bill decided to kick off the evening’s entertainment with his opening salvo.

I picked up the bottle and took a sip. The tavern was relatively quiet, just a few people in this early. I thought maybe I’d go get a cheeseburger, but Bill was still hanging out by us expectantly. He was wearing his little white apron and sitting there behind the bar, bracketed by all those bottles of booze, looking a little more inquisitive than normal – but then again, it was still early afternoon, before most people came through here to fill up the empty space with smoke and conversation. But I do my part, so I pulled out a pack of smokes and stuck one in my mouth, lit it before answering. “You did, huh?”

“My byline, front page, above the fold. Bill, that calls for a celebration,” Rick said, stretching his arms out over the bar in triumph. “No beer today, I think you’d better pour me a Scotch.” He pulled out a cheap cigar from the pocket of his ratty old sport coat, and started fighting the plastic wrapper. I sighed, and held out my hand. “Give it here.”

He passed me the cigar. “Above the fold,” he said again, admiringly. “You know how long it’s been since I got something like that? Been a long goddamn time.” I returned the cigar, having shimmied it free from the wrapper, and Bill slid over a ratty old trimmer along with a rocks glass with two fingers of whiskey straight up. Maybe it has been a long goddamn time since Rick’s gotten a good scoop, but it’s been an even longer time Bill’s been putting up with him, and they’ve got the after-work routine down to an art. Rick puffed out an enormous cloud of blue smoke, and as it settled into a haze, he settled in to the role of victorious storyteller. He cleared his throat, the clear sign that the night’s tale was kicking off.

“Two weeks ago, Sunday, a desk sergeant over at District 8 takes this call, from a woman, real distraught. Scared out her mind, can’t hardly string ten words together to make a sentence makes any sense. Says she went to see her neighbor and found her on the floor. Nothing obviously wrong, just an old lady dead on the floor, but this broad is off her rocker on the phone. So the sergeant gets a patrol car to swing over.”

Rick paused for thought, puffing cigar smoke like a steam engine. “Well, they didn’t know it for sure just then, but this was the third recent unexplained death in West Lawn. That was yestday. The patrol car gets over there and goes up to check it out. Nice little subdivision over by Midway, on South Kenneth, single family houses with little yards and garages and kids playing outside. First thing they notice is there’s a pile of papers at the door, nobody took ’em in. Nice maintained place like that, they don’t leave the papers outside to get rained on. Second thing they notice is, they go inside and the table’s all set for a nice little tea party! She’s got this china teapot with flowers on it, and a sugar bowl and two cups with saucers out on the table, even a little plate of cookies. One cup’s fulla tea, the other one’s tipped over and spilt all over the tablecloth. Little old lady, nice lace tablecloth. Sugar bowl with a little silver spoon sticking out.

“So they call it in to the station to get the coroner over, and when he gets there, the guy notices that she didn’t just fall off her chair, like the patrol cop thought. You know, he thought she had a heart attack and fell over, knocked over the tea cup and the chair on her way down, right? But the coroner, he says no. He says she went into convulsions, he can tell ‘cos of the way she’s got her arms and fingers, and the way the chair’s moved over like she was kickin’ it. And he says she puked, only she just hadn’t eaten so there wasn’t nothing real obvious for the patrol cop to see. So now he’s thinking it looks like murder, not just a little old lady expired from natural causes. Like maybe somebody brought some arsenic to go with her old lace.” Bill groaned.

I had drunk most of my beer while Rick was getting warmed up, and finished off the bottle, which is about the only thing that can explain my tilting at this particular windmill. “You know ‘wasn’t nothing’ is a double negative, right? And ‘arsenic and old lace’? Grammar school kids speak better than that, and they’re not writing for the Tribune.” I always was a lightweight.

Rick smirked at me over his Scotch, as another bottle of beer replaced my empty one on the scuffed bar, and his cigar trailed a lazy line of smoke toward the ceiling as he gestured vaguely through the air with it. “That’s what copyeditors are for. That, and coming up with stupid headlines.” He frowned, and the enormous caterpillars of his eyebrows squeezed together to emphasize his disapproval, as he continued, “‘Death by Delivery,’ that’s what they said was going on my piece. It’s like it’s the friggin’ National Enquirer, is what that sounds like.” He stuffed the cigar back into his mouth and puffed irritably.

The tavern was starting to get a few more people trickling in, since the deadlines were 6 for tomorrow’s edition, and about everybody had their pieces turned in by now or had given up on them, and the noise levels were going up just as the air’s transparency was going down. I thought some more about that cheeseburger, but I knew if I got up, Rick would just keep spinning his story, to thin air if no one else, and I’d miss it. The grease could wait. I reached for another cigarette instead. Outside, some jokers were exercising their anger through free and liberal use of car horns, out on Lower Michigan. All things considered, it was still quieter in the Goat. As long as Rick wasn’t talking, but then he put the cigar back in the ashtray.

“So, anyways. This coroner, he got called out a few months back, same neighborhood, two blocks over, on Kostner at 57th, just north of that park they got over there. Now this one was different. They got the call from a neighbor, hadn’t seen this guy leave his house for a few days, but he left all his curtains open. ‘Parently he always closed them at night, always, ‘cos he was kinda paranoid. So the curtains was open, but no lights was on, at night, so the neighbors got suspicious and called in the cops to investigate. Patrol went over and found him dead in the front room, just by the entryway. Couldn’t see him from the front window. Door was locked from the inside, so they thought it was a heart attack. Only thing was weird, was they couldn’t find his wallet.”

Bill stepped back up over to us from where he’d been pulling beers for other folks, and because Rick’s not the only person who he’s used to having around, he brought me a glass of Coke rather than another beer. He fumbled under the bar for a straw and said, as he slid it in the glass, “What was that ruled, natural causes?”

I stared at him. “You run a bar, listen to us jerks every day, and you don’t have anything better to do than egg this guy on?”

“Like you said, I listen to you jerks every day. What else have I got to do, other than notice you being cranky tonight?” Bill shrugged, and topped off Rick’s Scotch. He eyed me for a second, and then shouted over to the grill, “Double double!” The cook shouted “double double!” back, then Bill tipped me a wink and said, “You shoulda told me you were hungry. I’d’ve cut this guy off ’til you had a minute to get a burger.”

“Yeah, right,” Rick said. “You’d never cut me off, it’d cut into your tips.” He re-lit his cigar and puffed away some more.

“Okay, so, go on. Old man, heart attack in West Lawn, followed by old lady, apparent foul play, also in West Lawn.” I half turned in my chair to keep an eye out over to the grill, because now that they’d been ordered I was suddenly obsessed with all things cheeseburger. I could practically taste the pickles.

“Well, so two unexplained deaths of old folks in a two block radius is something that makes people talk. Much like we’re doing here.” Rick snorted at his own joke, and turned to eye the grill too. “One of them doubles is mine, right?”

I laughed. “Sure, Scheherazade.” Bill rolled his eyes.

Rick picked up his drink, and gestured with it, almost splashing Scotch on Bill, who glared and wiped down the bar with a rag that’d seen better days. Rick kept on talking. “So this policewoman hears all this talk round the station, and she comes up to the guy, my buddy’s buddy who was investigating the old lady’s death. She tells him, there was a third weird death in the area. This one wasn’t an elderly person though, this was this young married couple, both of them only in their thirties, but no kids. The wife died. The husband called the police one Sunday morning and said she just konked out while reading the paper. That was about a year before the old man died, though, and it was over on Kildare, up by 56th Street. The policewoman said she remembered it ‘cos her partner had been cracking up about it because the lady had been reading the sports section, and apparently the Cubs were in first place. So her partner kept joking about how he knew it was the Cubs and all, but it shouldn’t make nobody die of shock!

“So now we’ve got three weird deaths, in this tiny area, in the span of just under two years. The dead folks didn’t know each other, on account of they all lived on different streets. One was a recluse, one was a working woman, and the other was a retired lady. Two sudden heart attacks and one suspicious…something. So somebody started trying to connect the dots.

“Turns out they had brought out the forensics boys to the old guy’s place, just because, although they didn’t do much more than take fingerprints of the door and right around where the body was found. They only found two sets of fingerprints, the dead guy’s, and some unknown person. Didn’t turn up on any searches at the time. But when they took the fingerprints from the old lady’s place and ran them, they had a match on the unknowns from the dead guy’s place. Still unknown, but it was a lead, at least.

“Now, they all went back over the notes from the dead guy’s case. In the entryway, where the body was found, they didn’t find much. They never did find the guy’s wallet, but there was his keys and some mail on a little table by the door. The mail was a bill from ComEd, and a note about his newspaper subscription, saying someone’d be by for the weekly fee, a couple days before the concerned neighbors raised the alarm. So nothing real int’resting there. Except there was also a receipt for the newspaper subscription – you know, one of those little dated tabs the paperboy gives you, tears it off the sheet when you pay? So that was dated the day that the coroner figured he kicked the bucket, which was a Sunday, incidentally. So they went back to the coroner who’d been on duty for that one and got him to look at his notes, and turns out he saw something with the guy’s eyes, during the post mortem. Apparently there was signs that he maybe didn’t really have a heart attack but got smothered instead, like with a pillow. But the coroner couldn’t find any evidence to back that up so he ruled it a coronary and called it a day.”

The cook shouted over by the grill and I was off the bar stool like a shot. I could smell that cheeseburger from across the room, and all this talk of heart attacks or not, I was going to inhale it as soon as humanly possible. I paid the guy for both burgers and added a couple bags of chips, salt and vinegar, then went to load mine up with mustard and pickles. It was sitting on a piece of plain wax paper like a beautiful piece of art waiting to be framed, and it smelled like the best burger man had ever crafted. By the time Rick lumbered past me to pick his burger up at the grill, I was halfway back to the bar, and by the time he got back to his stool, I was half done with the burger and well into the chips. Bill raised his eyebrows, so I swallowed my mouthful, and said thanks. “Good burger, Bill.”

“Brown-noser,” Rick muttered. I just waved my hand at him, mouth full again.

“Anyways. That woman who died reading the paper? Turns out her husband was so broken up about it he left the dining room alone, didn’t go in it anymore after they took her away. Real tragic. Everything was exactly the same, when they went back to talk to him again. So the forensics boys had a field day with that. They came in and looked for prints and even checked out the drinks on the table and the newspaper. Which is when one of the forensics boys broke out in hives, right there in their dining room. The newspaper had something in it. But it was only the sports section, the rest of the paper was fine. They even sent it off to the state guys and the FBI to see if they could figure out what it was, but they couldn’t identify it, probably on account of it being two years old, and covered in dust, or something. And the guy with the hives, he’s allergic to everything except air, ‘parently, so that’s no help. But that was enough to reclassify the death as a homicide and reopen the case. So now that’s one murder, and two suspicious deaths.”

“And what linked the murder up with those other two,” I said, “other than it all happening in a two-block stretch of West Lawn, unless you’re going to tell me they found the same fingerprints at that scene that they did the other two?”

Rick made a pistol gesture with his hand, and pointed it at me. “You got it. They found the fingerprints. But not just that, they found the fingerprints on the murder weapon.”

“What, the newspaper?” Bill asked, in that gently skeptical way all barkeepers learned, from humoring drunks and their stories over the years. “I didn’t think you could get fingerprints off newsprint.”

“Well,” Rick said, “you prob’ly can’t, off newsprint. But cardstock you can. And guess what those newspaper subscription receipts are printed on? Cardstock.” He sat back and crossed his arms triumphantly.

I put the last bite of my cheeseburger down and stared at him. “So you have fingerprints on newspaper receipts at two of the scenes, which proves, what? They have the same paperboy? Not really a stretch there.”

Rick looked contemplatively at his cheeseburger, and ripped open his bag of chips instead. He ate chips for a good two minutes while Bill and I watched, and I broke first. “C’mon, Rick, finish the story.”

“I dunno if I wanna waste the rest of my story on you,” he answered primly, tone at odds with poking through the bag for the last of the chips. He crunched one last chip and dropped the bag down on the bar. “Okay.

“This is almost anti-climactic considering it’s been almost two years that these people have been dying in. They called up the subscription office and got them to give them the name of who was the paperboy for those houses, and it was definitely the same guy. So they get his information, and a patrol car goes over to knock on his door. He answers the doorbell, and just kinda stands there while the cops are asking him if he knows these first two victims. He’s all polite, right? And he goes, ‘Yes, I knew them. Yes, I knew him.’ The cop goes, ‘And did you know Mrs. Such-and-such,’ the old lady, and the kid’s face falls – he can’t be much older than 17 – and he goes, ‘Yes, she was making me tea, but I didn’t want tea, I wanted her to pay her paper bill!’

“They pulled him in to District 8 headquarters and got a full confession out of him, even after the court-appointed lawyer turned up. It turns out, this kid was some kinda nutjob, living in a fantasy world. He thought he was in this arcade game, where you go deliver newspapers but you have to hit bystanders with papers or they’ll come beat you up, or bees come attack you, some such BS. So he was thinking that everybody was out to get him and if he lost subscriptions, he’d lose all his lives. Like, three lives and then that’s it, you know, ‘game over.’ The one guy was talking about canceling, so the kid poisoned the sports section, only it turned out the wife liked baseball too so he got the wrong one of ‘em. The old guy was two weeks behind and that was almost an automatic cancellation. And the old lady had decided to take the Sun-Times instead. Anyways, it was some kinda wacko thing. I don’t play video games so I don’t know what the story was, but my kid plays that paperboy game too down the arcade. So he knocked off all those people just to keep ‘em from canceling the paper.”

Bill picked his wet rag up again, dumped out the ashtray, took Rick’s Scotch glass away, and refilled my Coke glass. He looked like he was thinking. Finally, he wiped off the bar in front of us, and said, reflectively, and in the most sincere voice I have ever heard from anyone outside of a nun sitting in the chapel during Sunday services telling me I would go to hell if I didn’t stop kicking the kneeler on her pew, “Rick, that is the biggest cockamamie horseshit story I have ever heard you try to sell anybody, and I have heard you shovel a lot of horseshit in this bar over the years.” He put another glass on the bar and filled it up with ice, then with Coke, then he slid a straw in it, and put it in front of Rick. Then he crossed his arms and looked at him.

Rick tried to look serious for a minute, but then he broke, and his whole body shook with his glee. “Yeah. I guess it was pretty obvious. Nobody would have made that arsenic and old lace joke unless they was jerking your chain, not even me.” He elbowed me. “But it was good way to spend a couple hours keeping out of the rain, right?”

I looked at him, and I looked at Bill. And I just shook my head at him. “Rick, if you’re not going to eat that cheeseburger before it gets cold, I am!”

~~ THE END ~~

I did have some worries, while writing this.

First, Rick’s dialogue is written quasi-phonetically (e.g., “yestday” instead of “yesterday”), which is something that irritates me a lot when an author does it excessively, but I thought it was important to convey the conversational tone as well as the type of character we’re listening to. It’s hard for me to break up the subject-verb agreement thing, and leave various words out wholesale, as well. I think I may have started out with more dialect and tapered off toward the end, but OTOH, maybe it’s OK to taper, like once you make da point at da biginnin dat dat guy tawks like dis, den you go back to normal. So. Consistency may be a virtue, or not writing really annoyingly may be. Not sure, there. (Also, Word’s grammar checker about had a heart attack over the dialogue. Poor tortured Word.)

Second, there was way too much dialogue. If I were better at finding plots I could have probably written something more succinct, but I had come up with this idea of the crazy paperboy killing his customers, and that was the best plot I’d come up with so far at that point, and the two guys bullshitting each other after work was how I wanted to convey that story-within-a-story. So, Rick the revered storyteller perches on a chair, our narrator is consumed with lust for the fabled Billy Goat cheezburger (no fries, cheeps!), and the background bartender (yes, named Bill after Bill Sianis, though no historical accuracy was intended at all in putting him there) humors them patiently, as he doubtlessly does night after night after Our Heroes put in another hard day’s toil at our city’s answer to the Grey Lady.

And last, the story was supposed to be set in a particular place, and the place was supposed to drive the story. That was sort of why I talked about West Lawn so much, but really the place I wanted the story to be about was the Goat. But while writing, I was having trouble putting in details about the Goat without it sounding overbearing or irrelevant. (“Bill listened patiently, as the bottles of liquor glistened dully in the dim overhead light, perched on the wood shelves on the mirrored wall.” Which bit is important, the back wall or the bartender? It’s the Goat, so it’s not the furnishings, okay? I love the Goat, but I don’t go there for the architectural significance.)

Anyways. It felt kind of nice to write a short story, which is one of those things that I have basically no confidence in my ability to do, because I never ever write fiction. I’m just not that sort of person. I like to blather about my life. (Hey look, ma, my short story was in the first person!) As the emergency backup, I’ll write something instructional or informational. But I think I did OK with this. Not great, it’ll never go down in the annals of great bar-related murder mystery fakeouts, but I think it was readable.

Oh, and last: credit goes to Kim, for the idea of the Atari “Paperboy” game. Yes, you really get attacked by bees if you screw up in the game. It was the 80s, man, don’t ask me.

1157 words. 1158 self-doubts. Roughly.

I moved here in August of 1995, to live on campus for my first year at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was straight out of high school, and I moved three hours away from my entire family and all of my friends. I made new friends at school, but trapped in a tiny dorm room living with someone who hated me and whom I hated equally in return, wore on me.

This situation was not much helped by my peculiar surroundings: the east campus of UIC was designed and built by one modernist architect, in the once-popular Brutalist style, and because of the tendency of UIC students to live off-campus, these indistinguishable buildings would stand like foreboding sentinels around a bleak, nearly deserted campus by 3:30 PM daily. I’m sure that Walter Netsch didn’t intend the school to make undergraduates weep with the despair of four years imprisoned in concrete, but he did a good job of it nonetheless.

I made a friend with a classmate who lived down the hall from me in my dorm, and every so often, we’d head to the lakefront, just a couple of miles away, to watch the sun come up behind the Adler Planetarium, to reclaim a tiny bit of beauty to take back with us to the wasteland. There is something cathartic about watching the sun come up over Lake Michigan. It’s quiet, except for the splashing of the waves against the seawall, or any wildlife that’s sharing the space with you. The quiet and the peculiar light can stay with you for far longer than the few minutes they last in reality.

I went to the lakefront to watch the sun come up recently, for the first time in many years. The sun rises earlier in July than January, so I set my alarm for the unholy hour of 4:30, and after I blearily shut it off and sleepwalked through brewing a travel mug of coffee, I biked down to the lakefront. Behind the Planetarium, the ground was littered with a handful of bright purple napkins with Hebrew lettering, the remnants of a celebration the night before. I dumped my bike in the grass and sat down on the staggered concrete wall and watched the clouds airbrushed over the pinkening sky.

It’s quiet on the lakefront at just past five AM, though not deserted. The spot I’d chosen for my vantage point was about thirty feet away from someone who had come down for a morning meditation session. A bicyclist passed on the path behind us, and two joggers passed, heading in opposite directions, on the lowest level of the pavement. The other watcher began to do yoga, and verbalized her exhalations, while I lazily sipped at my coffee.

There’s a funny effect if you stare at the lake long enough in this light. It’s almost like one of those pointillist optical illusions, where you can see the hidden pattern of a cat or a number inside a jumble of colored dots if you relax and unfocus your gaze. While looking at the light reflected off the silvery lake, the slow waves pushing toward the shoreline formed a gently rolling white static like an untuned television. There were no cats to be found in it, but it was a visual equivalent of white noise; easy and calming. I had gotten up to watch the sun, but the frame of mind it left me with would have been just as well suited to the end of the day.

The sun rises over the lake constantly, though it seems like it happens in stages. First an angry red-orange sliver slides up over the edge of the horizon, spilling red and gold on the clouds. It grows slowly, until it finally passes the halfway point and starts forming a circle. As it rises, the top part becomes harder and harder to look directly at: the density of the atmosphere protects you for a while, but as the angle gradually changes, the color grows lighter and brighter and begins to make your eyes water with the sharp sting of light. By the time it has fully risen, and a line of sky separates it from the lake again, it becomes too difficult to keep your eyes trained on it, though you may struggle to keep trying.

It’s easier to watch it make progress by the reflection on the waves. The red sparkles, starting like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, widen and grow orange. They grow more dense, until it seems less like sparks scattered at random, and more like a sequined fabric floating on the waves. It gives up its red color bit by bit, transitioning through shades of orange and gold until it turns to a lemon yellow. By that time, the clouds are no longer lit in an ethereal pink and gold, but just ordinary white water vapor again.

After the sunrise had faded into daylight, my yogini companion folded up her mat and, as she was walking away, jumped on her cell phone. I heard her explaining as she walked toward the city – “Today is going to be super busy. I have so much to do.” In comparison, I had nothing to do. My coffee cup was empty, and I walked back to my bike through the grass, my canvas sneakers dampened by dew.

It seems like a very precious thing to have this place. Sitting on those stairs behind the planetarium, at such an early time, it feels secluded and almost secret. Surrounding you for miles to your back are millions of people sleeping or eating or leaving for work, but in front of you there is nothing but water. If you turn your head in one direction you see acres of skyscrapers, only half a mile away, but if you turn your head to the other direction, it’s water without end. If you don’t turn your head at all, you exist simultaneously in the middle of a major city, but also in the middle of nowhere at all.

The difference of fifteen years from sunrise to sunrise is significant, but in some ways not at all. I am still a college student. I still drink too much coffee. I still don’t understand the appeal of religion, and I still don’t watch much television. I have retirement savings plans now, but fundamentally I remain the same as the girl who went with a friend to watch the sun come up in early spring of 1996. I still hate Brutalism, and I’m viscerally glad, nearly gleeful, that they are rebuilding the east campus of UIC with glass and natural materials, so that new students won’t have to feel the same isolation and disconnect that we did back then. I can still see, in my head, the handfuls of scarlet glitter sparkling on the water’s waves, and I can take that with me regardless of my physical space.

The first thing I said in our small-group discussion was, “I can like figure skating without having people assume I’m gay.” Which is true. Figure skating is totally safe for women to watch or participate in without it casting any homo-aspersions on their character, regardless of the amount of sequins. But a guy who wants to wear said sequins and twirl about on ice is pretty much just assumed to be, as they say, light in the loafers.

(Incidentally, what the hell does “light in the loafers” come from, anyways? Gay men have teeny dainty feet as they flounce down the street? Here, let me introduce you to my friends, at Bear Pride. There will be very little flouncing.)

Much of the other suggestions in class were along the lines of — “As a white man, I’m privileged that I can go walking around in Englewood and people assume I’m a cop and don’t mess with me.” (That particular student is, in fact, a CFD fireman.) There was a brief digression about whether or not it’s “privilege” for women to have doors held open or be allowed to board elevators before men, with one female student vehemently disagreeing, saying that it’s not privilege so much as it is etiquette. (Really? It’s not a privilege to have an entire section of the proper-behavior standards written, and actually enforced by the subservient class (as a man in class emphasized his negative opinions of men who do not let women go first, and as I have seen men lecture other men about at work), just because we have a particular set of chromosomes? What on earth is privilege, then?) Then there were the obligatory gags, like, “I’m privileged that my wife allows me to sleep with her!” (That from a dapper gentleman who works in theatre, who is likely more qualified than I am to speak as to what irrelevant qualities make people assume men are gay.)

By the time the whole-class discussion rolled around I’d refined the figure-skating line a little. I said, “as a woman, I can wear makeup or not wear makeup, dress up or not dress up, and whichever way I roll does not automatically make me gay or not gay.” I mean, really. It’s a privilege men don’t have. Show me a man who wears product in his hair and I’ll show you a “metrosexual,” which is a term invented just to identify grooming with homosexuality. I can go around in steel-toed boots and it makes me a goth; I can work on cars and that makes me either cool or sexy depending on who’s asking; I can work in a male-dominated industry and that just means I’m smart ‘cos I can keep up with the menfolk. But put a guy with nice hair in ice skates and sequins, and watch the instant transformation to someone that Deadspin is going to have to create an entire section about people euphemizing his gayness. (Bad example, perhaps — yeah, yeah, I know, it’s Johnny Weir, and hell yes I watched this and loved it! — but, really, people. Quit being little bitches about queers on ice.)

As I was walking home after class, I was extending and polishing the argument a little more. Basically it boils down to: Women can do non-traditionally-feminine things with little likelihood of it affecting their perceived sexuality or status. Men who do non-traditionally-masculine things have their Friend of Dorothy Club membership card handed to them after, like, the second offense.

So here I was getting all wrapped up in my excess of privilege as a woman, and feeling guilty about my own transgressions along these lines, when a car pulls out of a parking lot and a sketchy older guy in an eyepatch, in the passenger seat, leans out his window and shouts to a couple of cute young college girls walking a few steps ahead of me, “Hey girl! Come here and sit on my lap!”

They snickered (“ha ha, look at the drunk moron!”) and walked on, and he kept hollering, “Come here, girl!”

Meanwhile, a cute young college guy also walking down the street laughed his head off and chortled encouragement to Eyepatch as the car pulled out onto State Street.

Thus endeth my feeling guilty about the unfair privileges I enjoy as a woman.

Score: Gay men: 0, “girls”: 0, drunk shitheads: 1.

home, drinking said Goose Island and listening to the White Sox pregame on WSCR by 6:30.

LIVING IN THE LOOP == COMPLETELY PWNS THE ENTIRE WORLD.

Proposed solutions:
1) The Rage needs to open up a loop location. This solves actually most of these problems as I would just eat there every day for the rest of my life (until I died of deliciousness poisoning).
2) Finkl’s must come back. COME BAAAACK, PLEEEEEEEASE!!!
3) We need an authentic chippie. With authenticity emphasis on the food, not on the vintage “My Goodness, My Guinness” signage.
4) Or I could just give up and learn to stop complaining. Hahaha, as if that’s going to happen. GIVE ME BUTTER CHICKEN NOW!!

discuss.

today:

hmf.

…Lindsey Miller, 23, votes at the same polling place as Obama. She said Secret Service agents were checking names off a list and using metal-detecting wands on some would-be voters as they entered the polling place. The line was around the block at 6 a.m., she said.

“A lot of people were in pajamas. I know I was — not the time you want to be on national TV,” the University of Chicago graduate student said.

so. you live near obama. in fact, you vote at the same polling place. you chose not to vote early, and you chose to vote early in the morning, when it was highly likely that this very highly-observed candidate for the highest office in the land would be on site casting his own vote. you have presumably watched television in the past and know that national television news likes to cover candidates casting their votes. you saw the line and the secret service agents. and … YOU COULDN’T PUT ON A PAIR OF JEANS BEFORE LEAVING THE HOUSE?

i mean. seriously. i am not a highly trendy person, but i think the time has come for america to start paying a little more attention to our dress habits. PAJAMAS, to vote at the same polling place at the same time as a person who is possibly going to become the next president of the united states? in what universe is that sartorially okay? pay attention! pay attention and wear pants!

(…and don’t even get me started on people on airplanes, man.)