My town is a curious town. It’s not necessarily the people or the grocery stores or the small (often blue, questionably structurally sound) houses that make it so. Maybe it’s the pavement. The pavement is laid narrowly in the more harrowing, run-down areas. The mayor is constantly berated with concerns about the sidewalks from the couples who live in the East Egg neighborhoods. They feel threatened, I suppose, by their inability to accommodate for double-seated strollers. Though they often don’t expose their drooling cherubs to neighborhoods that offer tenement housing, said East Egg couples feel more poetic on the days that they do. I once asked a friend why he preferred to take walks in the downtown area. He told me it’s “because the trees.”
“The trees?”
“They aren’t planted exactly six feet apart.” He told me. When I pressed him on this, that was his response: “It’s poetic.” And so I took that answer for what it was: comfortable. And he was a good guy so I let him be comfortable.
Perhaps my town is curious because of the Steely Dan complex. The genesis of my town’s love for Steely Dan occurred in the summer of ‘06. Our local amphitheater housed their tour, along with The Chip Stephens Trio (if you don’t know who they are, they are exactly as they sound). Steely Dan took over my town with a continental wave of easy livin.’ Dads left and right plagued the streets with songs about how youth comes with age and ‘67 was the best year for dancing. All accompanied with glorious horns and an electronic jazz piano that plays two notes every break in between chord progressions. It was revolutionary. My dad himself was afflicted, and, to my horror, downloaded the “Greatest Hits” album on our shared iPod Nano. He and his buddy Chris enjoyed the jazzy rush of smooth but somehow “rockin’” Steely Dan. And they were not alone. All the dads conglomerated together, in a large glob of what can only be described as “easy livin.’” Kids who weren’t quite indy, but felt musically superior in the same way, joined. And soon the moms. Even when Steely Dan moved on to the next midwestern town, this trend continued through all of the classic rock bands that played at that same amphitheater. Bad Company was next, and as I’m sure you can guess, any band with a song titled the same as the band’s name was considered phenomenal in my town.
Every summer, it’s a new band. We soaked up the bliss of the next dad-rock band at lightning speed, and every subsequent band lasted a shorter duration than the prior. The ecstasy of having something new to enjoy in our grasps–it made moving on somehow even better. And one can’t help but get roped in to these cheap thrills when Chris and his kids were going to be in attendance. Of course I couldn’t turn down a ticket when Grace had her mom call my mom. The pinnacle of invitations took that route. And anyways, I felt nearly infinite screaming out the lyrics to the two most popular songs of any given band in the backseat of my mom’s Kia Sedona. From any summer’s Steely Dans, I only ever knew two songs maximum which, not coincidentally, were the ones that played six times a week on the radio station my dad listened to. But I liked to see him happy when I did. And so I let them spend money on me to be with them, rather than a 13 year old babysitter who charges 14 dollars an hour. I liked to see them both happy when I was.
My town might be curious because people only talk when nothing’s on the line. There’s something about small towns that just makes kids turn. High school has to be the worst, and it takes a very simplistic numbness to not be affected when certain kids are no longer around. But a lot of us have skillfully mastered it. My town knew it had an issue after the second death. Painkillers. Opioids. It hit us hard to understand that the epidemic somehow reached our quaint, little pink houses hidden within the nooks of larger suburbs, which were typically drowned out by city violence and news stories from a few towns over. We didn’t really talk about it until the third overdose. And even then, we never truly talked about it. Drug prevention assemblies started happening at school every Wednesday during advisory, and the kid’s family made a local scholarship in his name.
Him and I rode the bus together. We weren’t friends. We knew each other’s names and sometimes joined in on the same after-school bus debate, pretending like we had something figured out beyond the scope of our very few experiences. No one knew when it started, or how it started for that matter. All I know is that when I got my wisdom teeth out that same year, the surgeon didn’t give me Vicodin. Instead, he told me to alternate between over-the-counter drugs. It was a painful week, but I respected it. Understood that the propensity for addiction in my town was too high to risk it cropping up again. I wish we talked about it– actually. I was only 17, but the age was getting smaller. Kids grew up faster. After another overdose, we were in shock, we cried, and then we were silent. Back to complaining about sidewalk width. Speaking, but not saying anything. In silent remembrance, I watched as we all pretended like we forgot. Or maybe everyone did forget. And they were all comfortable with that. I went to college with his face on my mind, but somewhere along the way, I think I forgot too.
I moved into my Chicago apartment the following year. I discovered something when I lived in a city, however. My hometown was mostly curious because it never pretended to be something bigger than it was. We knew that taking walks around the tenement houses, calling that art, and giving in to the Steely Dan Complex majorly summarized the way in which we would always function: finding meaning in otherwise meaningless things. When I moved to the Sheffield neighborhood, that changed–almost diametrically. People lived fast in the city. People weren’t scared of what they were risking. They always had a plan, always talked about how this wasn’t their final destination. They wholeheartedly believed the city trains would move fast enough to transcend time and space–they’d be there one minute, and blast off the next. And that was how fast my friendships seemed to move before they fell off the rails.
People in the city move on. Even the hawks emigrated to the south when the sky took a preference to the ominous color gray and winter replaced the tourists.
It was strange noticing the effect a small town has on people. They see pain and experience it as anyone else, but learn to tilt their heads to make the perception more pleasant. In the city, there’s blocks and blocks of space to put between you and the thing you decide you can’t be around. And if you move fast enough, you’ll find something better.
That was a hard thing for me to accept. Everywhere I looked, I hoped to find crumbs of home– a sign that we weren’t all too different. Alas, I watched people move on from me faster than I was able to process. When I became interested in potential friendship, I fell hard and I fell fast, which could be quite self destructive. Think of me as a cannonball. Skyscrapers don’t take to cannonballs well. As I fell, the city bloomed over me. I would recognize that certain people weren’t perfect, and I would accept that imperfection as an unavoidable trait. Red flags started to arise, and with the beautiful Chicago buildings blinding me from seeing clearly, I seemed to miss them every time. Alas, cannonballs are small and dense, skyscrapers are ubiquitous, and as I plummeted to the slightly wider pavement, I trusted that somehow, somewhere, someone would catch me.
That person showed up somewhere between the time I decided ripped jeans could get me friends and Yoko Ono shirts could lose me some. His name was Nick and we met in a required rhetoric class. He had survived the blistering Chicago winds his whole life, and knew the pace of the city well. He did a lot of drugs and played in one of my university’s well known student bands. Though we were two people that came from entirely different backgrounds, he had a curiosity that reminded me well of a place I knew and couldn’t help but love.
One day, he took me on what seemed like an impossible voyage. According to him, past the Daley Center, down a few alleys, the most underground and underrated pizza place prevailed. I took his word for it and we embarked. We had a small setback, however. The plan was to take the Red Line train a few stops south, but when we got to the station, we waited an ungodly amount of time (maybe ten or fifteen minutes). That’s when the intercom announced, “The Red Line trains are delayed due to an unauthorized person on the tracks.” Of course, it put a damper on our plans, but the shared annoyance in the station became thick enough to cut with a knife. Some people scattered, probably on their way to call a cab, and others simply paced and glanced at their watches. I looked back at Nick to find him somber– there was a very distinct tranquility that set him apart from the folks concerned about being late for work. I shrugged and he flashed a sad smile of reassurance. We decided food from the dining hall would suffice and retreated back to his apartment.
“Can I tell you something about the city?” He asked later on, when I found comfort on his kitchen floor.
“Please.”
“It’s kind of insane the way we grow numb to headlines about stabbings and murder and stuff.” Not what I expected but I let him continue. “Being packed like sardines in one geographic location really forces you to be selfish.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, humans do terrible things to other humans, there’s no question about that. But humans do terrible things to themselves too.” I blinked. “I just wish we would talk about it. Instead we get upset when a man jumps on the train and it inconveniences us. You shrug at me, I smile at you. We get no pizza, and that’s the end of it.” He was right. I wished we could talk about it too. Tragedy unveils itself in fragments. As a human race, we suck at putting the pieces together.
It probably wasn’t the right time to smile, but I did. I replied to his puzzled expression by looking away. He assured me I didn’t have to talk about anything I wasn’t comfortable with– a subtle nod to the monsters we shared. I shook my head. This was the first time in the city I’d truly felt at home.
To further satisfy my curiosity, I asked him about his upbringing. He told me it was probably a lot like mine. Without truly doubting that, I argued that even a child could recognize and grow differently because of the pace of the city. He disagreed firmly. “Living in a city doesn’t make a child less of a child.” I argued that city people and suburb people are of a different kind.
When he pressed me on this, I stated, “People are people. But where they come from makes all the difference.”
“I think it’s more important where they end up.” He quickly changed the subject, “are there hawks where you’re from?”
“Hawks?”
“Yes, like the bird.”
“Yeah plenty of them.”
“There are a lot here too.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
“So you notice hawks in the city. You notice hawks at home. The hawk can fly anywhere in the world, but it decides to stay here. Do you ever wonder why?” I shrugged. “I do. Always.” And that was the end of it. He’s curious. Curious indeed.
Gina Arndt is from the South-West Suburbs of Chicago and has been storytelling as long as she has known how to write. She is a freshman at DePaul University and a Criminology and English double major. Her hobbies include composing and playing guitar, singing, writing, and participating in theatre.