Chicago Doesn't Lie

I drove through Chicago once. I wasn't impressed, unless you count the burning of my eyes. It felt like the hot smoke of a cigarette rolling up my cheek searching for the pupil. You can't do anything except wince tightly and try to finish something inconsequential but urgent. You sure as fuck won't spit the cigarette out of your clenched teeth, but you can swear you're not addicted, or curse through them.

I'd gotten used to the smell of manure sixty miles out of New Jersey. I'd been confined there and in my mother's fears my whole life and I'm still not so sure yet which was which. I thought it was awful – the bullshit, that is, and then I got used to it. Now I long for it as Chicago's skyscrapers penetrate the horizon and I'm gravitationally limited to running flat on Route 80 West, listening to a band I'll be embarrassed of twenty years later. I can't wait to get Chicago in the rear view mirror, which my eyes seem so reluctant to leave. Everything's closer than it appears, even through a film of nicotine. I long to breathe manure again and tell myself it's fresh air.

Twenty years later, I'm still confined but at least I can't remember the name of that band. I'm still embarrassed though.

Now, Chicago comes to me, driving through me, speaking truths I'll never understand because I can't even see the world through my own eyes. So I'll just borrow his for a while and wonder how one of them got dotted – talking smack? talking about smack? – which cleverly disguises his ruin under David Lynch skies.

I didn't stay in Chicago, I only passed through. Thirty minutes, limit to limit. The smog choking me like a misinformed lover who thinks I get off on it. I tell her to stop but secretly my mind's timid voice begs her to keep hurting me.

Now, Chicago stays with me, haunting me like something I shouldn't have done yet relishing every moment I was doing it. He was at least brave enough to fuck his life up aggressively while I did my own in buying expensive patio furniture on over-extended credit cards and her promise of "I'll never to it again."

When I got back from that cross-country trip, all I found was an anonymous houseful of unfamiliar classmates and the realization that all roads out of Jersey require a toll. Through an atmosphere of whiskey, they speak amiably to each other about their futures, and I feel alienated. My post high-school plans consisted of 8500 miles of interstate ending at the Cape May-Lewes Ferry with nothing but a friend I'd never see again and a half tank of gasoline. We're not the Blues Brothers.

I want to slash my wrists but my mother'd be pissed, not to mention ashamed. Some things are too immense to sweep under the rug in one slashing. I'm not so sure how my father would feel – one hand of his laid out the route I'd just traveled while the other denied the very DNA I didn't have the guts to spew all over someone's kitchen.

Instead, I see the scar of compromise on my left thumb print twenty years later. It makes as much sense to me as a Jackson Pollock painting and almost as expensive.

Thirty minutes later, Chicago's finished inducing opium-like dreams of a desert I passed through two decades earlier. I wish I could reminisce about kicking the nagging corpse of some love-struck whore out the passenger side of my '78 Chevy Nova. Instead, the corpse was driving, flicking cigarettes out the window at a 15 year old hitchhiker wearing an unwashed Led Zepplin t-shirt who made the same trip three years earlier and decided to stay.

I don't know why they call it the Windy City. The air hangs around it like chronic halitosis. Wind would be like a much welcome Tic-Tac. Still, I breathe deep, inhaling toxins that'll eventually metastasize and encroach on my shame. Honestly – I wonder if that's what shooting up feels like.

The thin line of mismatched swirl pattern on the fingerprint card reminds me that – when it comes to life and poetry – choose a vital spot and cut deep. Don't worry about the mess or who you'll piss off, you won't be around to clean it up. Chicago would agree.

Chicago doesn't lie.