I’ll be honest, other than the spectacular one night stand I had, I haven’t really enjoyed my trips to Chicago. The city is so tall and square and rigid. It disorients me. Boystown is exciting in a generic Soho/Canal St/Castro way, but the city on the whole hasn’t spoken to me.
I wonder if it’s because I haven’t understood Chicago in its proper geographical context. Ladies and gentleman, may I present Lake Michigan. It is huge, unfathomably huge.
This is a lake? Where are its other edges?
I, of course, bought an ice-cream. I swam in the salt-free water and proved, once and for all, that I am the king of underwater handstands that almost denude you.
Later, in the hotel, the lightning that has rolled in off the lake is so close that I can’t even get to “one Mississippi” before the thunder begins. The buildings are so tall that by the time the rain gets to me (on the lowly 10th floor) it has been beaten into a mist. I lie in my gratuitously plush bed and listen to the cars and the rain and the sirens and feel that there is a strangely human resonance to the sounds… something like singing or lowing. It makes me feel big inside, and I can smell the same lotion that was rubbed into my back on my first visit to Chicago. Lovers and lightning make me feel, I don’t know. Good, I suppose. I concede the city has potential.
