Volkswagen Memories

 Reprint from ten years ago, while I was still living in Wilton Manors. Florida. May, 18, 2009.

I was standing outside a bar on Wilton Drive the other evening, when like a ghost out of my past, an ancient Volkswagen Microbus clattered by. In 1969 when I was nineteen years old and a budding hippie, I purchased the de rigueur vehicle for all hippies, a Volkswagen Microbus. I hippied it up with a little paint and some curtains, and voilà, I had a rolling pot den. The problem was that I should have known better than to get a Volkswagen with all the bad luck I had with them in the past.

My first bit of bad luck came some years before, while I accompanied my older brother on a trip up to Great Lakes Naval Base in his 1954 VW Beetle. While tearing down the Illinois Tollway at the Beetles top speed, about sixty miles per hour, I noticed a tire and wheel rolling along side our car. Seconds later a horrible scraping sound filled the car and the source of the rogue wheel became apparent. We screeched along the pavement for hundreds of feet, sparks flying as the brake drum gouged a groove in the road. With a grassy ditch and bridge quickly approaching, I screamed like a little girl while my brother fought to control the car. Luckily my brother did manage to guide us to a safe stop a few feet before we would have plunged off the bridge to the highway below. I think my mom had to use extra bleach on my underwear that week.

My second bit of bad luck came while cruising around and smoking pot with my cousin in his Volkswagen Beetle. We drove out into the countryside so that our pot smoking wouldn't be noticed by anyone. As we puttered along the country roads, the little car filled with a cloud of marijuana smoke, and in his altered state my cousin misjudged a ninety degree turn. The car slid off the pavement, into the gravel, and started a slow roll down the embankment while I, in my pot stupor, watched the world turning over and over through the windshield. Far out, I thought, until I noticed the blood running down my arm. We survived that wreck, but I still didn't learn my lesson.

For my final bit of bad Volkswagen luck, I managed to blow up the engine in my hippie microbus twice and ended up stranded in Pennsylvania. That was a pain in the ass, yet when I saw that beat-up old Volkswagen Microbus rattle past the other evening, a twinge of nostalgia came over me. The nostalgia soon passed when I remembered that the VW had no air conditioning and very poor heat. Also, the thought of a head on collision bothers me.

Naked Hippies

Wednesday, on my way home from Mom's house, I hit Lake Shore Drive and came to a complete stop. Snarled traffic from the Stevenson Exit as far as I could see. When I finally creeped around the bend by Soldier Field I realized what the problem was. Lollapalooza. The big music festival held every summer in Grant Park was being set up. All the left turns through the park had been closed off, confusing all the tourists whose GPS devices were telling them to turn left.

Lollapalooza, festival of heat, dirt, sometimes mud, and music. Usually music by bands I have never heard of. Not that I wouldn't go to a music festival. I have, a couple of times. Only not in the last fifty years. Seriously, it was fifty years ago in August that I and a friend, feeling left out because we had missed Woodstock, decided to drive down to another hippie music festival in Louisiana. It was just like Woodstock, but without the free part and with about half a million fewer people. I didn't care. The music was good and I was surrounded by fifty thousand other hippies, many of them naked. Also, there were plenty of drugs. And yes, eventually I did find myself stoned and naked. I remember a river that ran past the event, a very muddy river. In that river were many naked, swimming hippies, boobs a bouncing and wieners flapping. Of course I joined them. There was one local there who did not go in the water. I don't remember how I got to talking to him, but I remember what he said.

"Y'all know there's water moccasins in that river."

"Um... no. Didn't know that."

"Yep, alligators too."

"Alligators?"

"Aw, don't worry. They're probably scared off by all those people splashing around in there......   Probably."

How I Came Out of the Closet

All of these shirts were in my closet

I need space. Besides all the clutter and stuff that Mark crams into this house, I actually own some of the things taking up valuable room. In the last week I have been thinking about what I have clung to all these years and if I really need all of it. So I've started the thinning. One of the things that probably won't be thinned is my fat ass. I've come to realize that I will never have that thirty two inch waist I last saw in 1997. That is why I've started with my clothes. About once a year I buy some new clothes and jam them into my closet in front of the things already hanging in there. I push and shove, and squeeze shirts and pants in. It makes no sense. At the end of the closet, closest to the door, are about ten things that I wear day after day. Five summer things and five winter things. As you move through, towards the deep end of the closet, like an archeologist you see what I wore in years past. By the time you get to the farthest point you will find clothing over twenty years old. Some, near thirty years old. No way will I ever squeeze into those skinny pants again. I have shirts that, if I were to try and put them on, would either pop a seam or make me look like a string of deli sausages. So I pulled them all out and shoved them into five large trash bags. I then took them down to the Brown Elephant resale shop on Clark Street. I'm not sure if they'll be able to sell all that old crap, it is in the middle of an upscale gay neighborhood. I just can't see gay men walking around with fashion from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Unless it's the hipsters. They love that 'ironic' bullshit. 

Crazy Eights

I went shopping at the Jewel Food Store on Saturday without Mark. If I have to go shopping, it's best I go without Mark. It's much easier without him. Mark was feeling under the weather so he wrote up a list for me and sent me on my way. There are a few reasons why I prefer no Mark on the grocery trip. First of all, I don't have to follow him all over the damn store as he zips back and forth on one of those electric shopping carts. Also, with a list I know exactly what's expected. When Mark shops, he does not bring a list. "I know what I need." is what he tells me, and then we graze through the store buying this and that, crap and shit we don't need. He fills up both the electric shopping cart and the cart that I push behind him. The only thing that makes it tolerable at all is the liquor lady at the far end of the store. She hands out sample shots of all kinds of alcohol and isn't afraid to give me multiple shots. This week it was Jose Cuervo. Ole!

So I was shopping on my own this week. It was horrible. Jewel had a number of sales going on and Mark wanted me to take advantage of them. I don't think he has bought anything at the Jewel in three years that wasn't on sale. The list he gave me was quite complicated and buying the sale items all required some math skills. There was the 'Crazy Eights' sale, where you had to buy eight things to get all of them for eighty eight cents. Only multiples of eight, mix or match. So I had to keep count of what I was buying. One bag of salad, one box of pasta, five bottles of lemonade, and on and on. As long as it was eight, or sixteen, or twenty four, those things would be only eighty eight cents. Ah, but right next to the crazy eight products were the 'Buy One, Get One Free' stuff. They looked exactly like the crazy eight products, but were a different size. So I had to figure which sale saved the most money. Two cents here, five cents there, Mark would go crazy if I screwed up the crazy eights sale. I spent two hours in that store trying to get it right. I did make two trips over to the liquor lady which helped, but I was over it. I made sure I had my multiples of eight right and checked out. When I got home Mark discovered that the cashier had charged me twice for a bag of shrimp. Yes, he went nuts and I had to drive back over there and get his money back. But hey, I got the whole crazy eights thing perfect. Although, I don't know what we're going to do with eight bottles of lemonade. I suppose I could mix it with my vodka.

Food Chain

Nice and hot here in Chicago. Almost exactly like Florida, but not quite as humid, and without the flying cockroaches, and without the fear of hurricanes for half the year. I would say also without alligators, but if you've been watching the news, we got one. Or I should say, had one. Over in Humboldt Park, in the lagoon, was a four foot alligator. Somebody must have dumped their pet alligator in there because it was getting too big. Knowing the Humboldt Park neighborhood, I would guess it was a gang banger, drug dealer who thought an alligator would be really good security. Imagine breaking into an apartment or house and finding a gator guarding things. Much scarier than a dog that would probably lick you if you brought hamburger. Try to feed an alligator hamburger. It doesn't know where the hamburger leaves off and your hand begins. Anyway, the gator has been captured. Some expert from Florida flew up here and managed to catch it within just a few hours after park district employees failed for a week. I kind of feel sorry for the little fellow. He was minding his own business in that lagoon, and seemed quite happy. He had all the ducks he could eat, probably some catfish too and had no competition for them. I assume now that the reptile has been caught, it will be sent to Florida to live out his life. Which may not be long. It is a spoiled house pet who will be living in the Everglades for the first time in its life. He'll probably be eaten by one of those Burmese Pythons that have invaded Florida. Ironically, introduced by some pet owner who dumped his pet python in the Everglades because it got too big.

The See

2006, The building was still there.

In the late 1980s I was living in an apartment on North Halsted Street above a Chinese restaurant. I loved living there. It was a busy street and the three story wood frame building would shake every time a CTA bus would roll by. I didn't care, I was close to everything about Chicago I loved. I could walk to the lake, I could walk to gay bars, and one time I even walked all the way up to Michigan Avenue. What I didn't understand about living there was why, every few months, I would get mail from The People's Republic of China. It wasn't exactly addressed to me, but to somebody called 'The See' at my address. I would open the cheap looking brown envelope and inside would be a colorful pamphlet with glowing praises of China and Chinese Workers. It was propaganda. But why was this coming to my address? This stumped me for years until I started to think about the history of that building and the neighborhood. Now it is a gentrified city neighborhood with rents way out of my reach. But that was not always so. Just two blocks south of that building, on July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was shot down by the police in an alley. I started thinking about what I knew of the place. Before I moved into the building and before it had been rehabbed by my friend Rudy, It was a rundown slum. Down on the first floor in the early 1980s was a 'juice bar' where underage gay teens and others could hang out. I know that because I was the bartender at a bar two doors down and those kids were relentless in trying to buy a drink from me. I saw more fake ID's when I worked there than Jeffrey Epstein. Before it became a juice bar it was a regular bar. Ummm... not really that regular. It was called The Snake Pit and was not for the weak of heart. I think the juice bar was also called The Snake Pit, but without a liquor license. The shit that went on in there caused them to lose that. Now we go back even further, when that stretch of Halsted had a bit of gang activity. The 1970s you knew a shooting was about to happen because the street lights would go out. Somehow the gangs could turn off the street lights so they could do their dirty work in the dark.

Anyway, I finally figured out why I was getting propaganda from The People's Republic of China. My apartment must have had some connection to the underground newspaper called The Seed. A left wing, radical newspaper established in 1968, and published until 1974. I read it often. I know their offices were just around the corner on Wrightwood Avenue, so I assume they had their mail delivered to somebody at my address just in case the mail was explosive. Or maybe they had it delivered to that address to throw off the FBI. I figured that the Chinese had mistakenly dropped the 'd' in Seed. Lost in translation. Anyway, The building is gone now. Torn down and replaced by expensive condos. I wonder, are the new tenants, Becky and Todd, still receiving those little brown envelopes from The People's Republic of China?

2628 North Halsted now.