​Of course, years later, I learned that many boys and a good handful of girls during the Great Depression sought shelter and refuge on Chicago rooftops. While on wandering walks in the city, or on an occasional skate, I keep my head up and I often try to imagine them – stealthy orphans stealing up stairs, fire escapes, and ladders to find solace and to get a better view of their catastrophic and shimmering city. (It’s no wonder that the rooftops of Gotham City were originally based on Chicago’s.) Today, our city’s rooftop bombers, taggers, and artists chase the ghosts of these orphans and seek the same thing that they once did – refuge from the formulaic and often brutish world below. We could learn a thing or two from them.

For all of its efficiency and necessity, a rooftop is a place to go when you feel the need to escape or when you need a different perspective of the city – inexhaustible towers, a cerise sunrise, the unfading blue of our great lake – but it’s also a place to consider and reflect on high. A place to go alone and wander the labyrinth of your thoughts. A place to bellow an Odyssean verse. A place to cavort with modern history. A place to abandon memory. A place to slow dance to Sam Cooke (or, R. Kelly, depending on your skool!) with someone you love, or at least, someone you love at the moment. Of course, the best rooftops are the ones where you can get epically drunk, commune with the ridiculous universe, and party with your friends like rooftop deities. So, yes, for all their efficiency and necessity, rooftops end up attracting orphans and artists and lovers and partygoers and would-be-gods. Essentially, in the city of Chicago, a rooftop is a Dionysian institution of refuge.

One particular night, some years back, a few good friends of mine and I needed a little refuge. We had just spent the previous two days and two nights on a non-stop hyper writing drive in order to submit to Bravo’s Project Greenlight, a tour de force competition in which thousands of young men and women across our Hollywood blitzed nation produce and/or write a television show over the course of two days and two nights, which is to say that thousands of young men and women quietly suffer those two days and two nights away under the illusion of a generous and grandiose Hollywood. Ah! But this is America. We have deities wearing crowns of sitcom scripts and wielding swords sharpened by Tom Cruise’s very own chin! To only be them. So very worth it! Our sitcom was entitled Settling Up. Basically, it was about on-going divorce proceedings between an awesomely hilarious, weight lifting, Camaro driving slacker and his equally awesomely hilarious once-bra-burning, fight-the-power wife turned corporate leviathan. The pilot episode starts when their runaway son returns to Chicago from Taiwan with a beautiful, fish-out-of-water Taiwanese pop star only to discover that his parents are getting divorced! It was, uh, a commentary, or something, on Baby Boomers and love. Ok! I know. I know. Absurd. BUT. We had spent 48 hours writing the damn thing and we loved the damn thing. Trancelike Hollywood was clearly awaiting us…That is until one of us, in a sitcom-y inspired moment, accidentally erased our only copy. So, with the click of a mouse button and a resounding if not entirely despondent and un-ironic booooooooo, our great masterpiece disappeared into the digital netherworld. Devastated and exhausted, we did what fallen Chicago writers do best – we absconded to a rooftop party. And ended up ruining it. While a moderately pleasant and mostly hip crowd attempted to quietly watch a very hip foreign film on a gorgeous rooftop off of Division, we drank a good portion of their alcohol and yelled at wonderfully drunk and attractive people on the street, who were not on their way to a rooftop party, who were, in fact, concrete dwellers. We felt sorry for them. We invited them up, much to the chagrin and angst of our hosts. We danced with them. We told bad jokes. Really bad jokes. From the sitcom we had just written and lost. We mourned our loss. We yelled and high-fived and made impossible promises of stardom. We threw bottles at the flaxen half-moon and listened as they crashed somewhere off in the distance. Dionysus of the Rooftop had clearly seduced us with hallucinations of Hollywood and ruckus.

​We got kicked out. And the moderately pleasant and mostly hip crowd stopped inviting us to parties.

A few years later, I found myself with a friend of the host of that rooftop party. We were celebrating and, in part, grieving, the last evening of the infamous and jazzy, deep red music club the HotHouse. Sometime during the coral stained sunrise in a few hours, the doors off Balbo Drive would close, and like so many other things neglected by the constant metamorphosis of our city, the club would disappear into a maze of memory. To further our disremembering, we danced and drank up the last of the club’s offerings. And sometime during the night, a small crowd of us retired to the rooftop to enjoy the silvery breeze coming off the Lake and to talk. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I’m sure it was mostly about myth and family and politics, Chicago’s triumvirate, and the friend of the host of the Division rooftop party wondered aloud if I would ruin the good conversation by throwing bottles at skyscrapers. I smiled and told her that I would not. I told her that I had abandoned sitcom writing and was now focusing on bigger and better things – a stage sketch show featuring PBS’s Star Gazer Jack Horkheimer and a rabbi that pitched bad sitcom ideas to Hollywood executives. I also told her that with age I had found reservation and maybe even a little maturity. Something like that. She smiled sweetly; though, I don’t think she believed me. We quietly sipped our drinks and watched the city lights and from the street below we heard laughter, debonair laughter or the midnight laughter of the soon-to-be damned. Before long, someone pulled out a camera and was taking photos of Balbo Drive, and I thought offhandedly, or I am thinking offhandedly now (rooftops have an ethereal affect on me) about how Balbo Drive was named after Italo Balbo, the fascist Italian aviator who flew from Rome to Chicago for the 1933 World’s Fair, proving once again, as the Swedish born, Chicago sculptor Claes Oldenburg once stated, that Chicago has a metaphysical elegance of death about it. We watched the photographer and I promised for a third time that I would behave. I wanted to behave. The night was elegant and self-possessed and I couldn’t think of a better place to be in the world. I turned my attention to the sky and the lights of the stars were somehow fused with the lights of the skyscrapers, a primrose fusion like that from a Van Gogh painting, and the skyscrapers themselves, ones I had known my entire life, seemed poised to puncture the night in what could only be considered defiance of a mortal life.

Photo by interpunct on Flickr.

Photo by Flickr user see what you want to see

Of course, there are a few hundred workers who spend nearly their entire lives drifting and buzzing through the outer and inner workings of the city. They dress like cadmium bees and search for new ways to improve the city’s metabolism and refashion its logic and design and art. The entire process takes nineteen years. When they are ready to rebuild, they hire thousands of financers, bricklayers, welders, and poets, who understand the passing of time and the inception of new generations, which is another way of saying that they are also mothers and fathers. Only this select group of workers can unravel the layers of the old city, the concrete labyrinths, the fiber-optic nerves, the effigies, the shadows which blanket the streets like vast flower petals. And once they do, they then can begin the repetition of creation, which, give or take a few days, takes the entirety of a year.

And so, you can see quite easily that the citizens of Checagou get lost in memory more than anybody from most any other city. They stand in parks or on corners in small groups and debate the true memory of the city: the howl of a train, a flush pink skyline, a single firecracker at night, a child in an alley laughing, an endless party, a streak of soot, an electric blues guitar on a shelf, a thuggish winter, a candied summer, a celestial rooftop, a geometry problem written on the sidewalk like a poem. All the things that have already come to pass. The city’s tour guides, peddlers of lost memory, repeat these debates for weary and callow travelers.

And ultimately, what is the rhyme and reason for all of this rebuilding and amnesia. It can only be this. I remember coming to Checagou and finding a man by the lake who was telling onlookers that you can’t predict human behavior and that if you tried people would just do the opposite of any given prediction, if only to prove it wrong. He said that this demonstrated that human nature was erratic and mercurial, and that any great city should follow suit. So, I’m sure that the citizens of Checagou listen to this man by the lake as a blueprint or even a muse for their own mad and forgetful conduct.

Photo by Flickr user wvallen

The rabbi turns to the middle-aged man, who he remembers as being an urgent and finicky boy years ago, and asks, “Have you read your Torah and Talmud?”

“Yes.”

“Have you read your Darwin and Dawkins?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And your Camus?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Hmmmm,” the rabbi ponders out-loud, “this is a good question. Rosenblum from Rosenblum’s World of Judaica Incorporated on Devon used to have a good answer for this one.”

“Well then?”

The rabbi is overwhelmed with the question and takes a seat. He doesn’t say anything for a few minutes and in that time the middle-aged man fears that the world will indeed come to and end and his question will never be answered.

The rabbi finally furrows his eyebrows and says, “I will tell you what Harold Ramis’ rabbi told him.”

“The comedian Harold Ramis? From Ghostbusters?”

“Yes. That’s him. Also, the director of Groundhog Day. Best philosophy film ever by the way.”

“And you’re going to tell me what his rabbi told him?”

“Yes, that’s exactly it,” the rabbi answers and continues, suddenly excited, “he told Harold Ramis that he should take two pieces of paper. On one he should write the following words: The world was made for you today. On the other, he should write: You are a speck in the universe. The rabbi then told him to keep the two sheets of paper and go on living his life.”

“And this is the meaning of the universe?”

“Did I mention that Harold Ramis directed Groundhog Day?”

In a great city, people walk around thinking that they are both great themselves and also that their lives are pretty much incomprehensible and senseless – a speck of dust floating by an empty storefront window. In Chicago, our great city of Americana, people do this on a daily basis. In the City by the Lake, we live in a deep reservoir of philosophical dysfunction. It is nearly impossible to ride the Western bus or walk down State Street without spotting dozens of people who look as if they are deeply and sincerely confused about their own greatness and also about the impending doom of the universe and their miniscule place in it. Chicago has this effect on people. It’s a city where, if you play your cards right, you’ll be remembered. It’s also a city where you can spend your days and nights lost in a labyrinth. We are all part Augie March, part Studs Lonigan. Our skyscrapers reach for the empyrean; our taverns are full of dust. And, between it all, we wander, poor philosophical Chicagoans!, perplexed by the meaning of it all.

That is why when you find yourself in one of these Chicago induced moods it is paramount, much like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, to find a place and stay there until you figure it out. It is important to have a place, a physical locale that gives the illusion of permanence (because, in Chicago, few things are permanent), in order to dive into the deep questions of the universe. So, when I start to feel a little like Bill Murray, I go where he did – the Old Town Ale House in Old Town, where permanence reaches ages back to the year of its opening, 1958, and where canny comedians and generally funny people from Second City across the street gather with old-school on-the-blockers to get seriously and hilariously drunk and metaphysical. It is not uncommon to find ex-pat Iowa newbies and North Avenue regulars debate the merits of falling in love on a Friday vs. Sunday. Or to hear a satirically large and bearded waiter, who spends his nights serving the gentry down Wells Street, entice the bar with a story about loss and vengeance and memory. And if that’s not your thing, if you’d rather sit at one of the raised tables near the opaque windows at the front of the bar and silently consider your greatness and your inevitable fall into nothingness, prompted, no doubt, by a sweet Chicago boricua or by the loss of a less-than-ideal but still necessary job, then that’s OK too. Old Town Ale House is the perfect place for that sort of thing. Without having to say anything to them, the bartender and the patrons will understand exactly why you’re there. And when you come across a particularly strenuous ripple in the universe and need a break, you can spend some time in the bar admiring all the licentious art on the wall, painted by the bar owner’s husband, Bruce Elliot. Among the dozens and dozens of portraits of regulars, his work features half naked and fully naked people wonderfully fondling each other and catching each other in the act. These images are Chicago as the original licentious city. These images also evoke Chicago’s dual fascinations for sex and politics – the ghosts of the Everleigh sisters and Big Bill Thompson come back to haunt us in dry, comic form. (One of the artist’s latest ingenious creations is a butt naked Blagojevich readying for a prison cavity search.) And when you’re ready to leave, liquid-eyed and smirking, you can take the bar’s philosophy and art lectures with you. You can take its raw politics, its heartbroken shrugs, its unfinished stories, and walk right down to the lake. A few people might already be there, waiting for the sunrise. (And, if it’s spring, as it is now, and if you’re lucky enough, a storm might roil the lake and charcoal clouds might turn the city into a contour or suggestion of the city. Or an invisible city.) And you can wait with these strangers – a half-asleep cab driver, a teenage couple, and a calm and patient fisherman. Each whose own greatness and senselessness, like yours, are already in question. You can wait with them until the sun rises, a monstrous sun, or a sun verging on monstrous. And, when it does, a razor-thin moment will cast the entire lake and the entire city into a simple and endless shade of cerise. And, of course, you’ll yell, “Aha! Universe. I caught you in the act! You wonderful, naked, sly piece of shit. Harold Ramis’ rabbi was right! This morning will be different from the last. This morning the potential for greatness and dust will linger most.” And you’ll realize that you can in fact fight against the nothingness that will sweep us all away, and that really, you have no other choice.

Photo by Flickr user Stuck in Customs

But you’ve seen the movie right? It’s never that easy.

The night before my 7AM flight, my cousin Santi proposed to his girlfriend. To my family in Ecuador, this is the familial equivalent of New Years and Carnival combined. This is the ghosts of all your ancestors pouring you endless shots of tequila and telling you that if you play your cards right Simón Bolívar himself will show up with a pig slung over his massive shoulders.

So, when I tried to check in the airport at 5:30AM, a cruel immigration official determined that I was either a disturbed castaway from Lost (probably Sayid) or that I was much too drunk to go anywhere. He asked a lot of questions about where I had been drinking the night before and my nationality. As to the former question, I told him everywhere in Quito. I held off on the high-five. I’m 30. It’s just not appropriate anymore. As to the latter, I told him I have dual nationality with the US and Ecuador. I told him I was goin’ to Chicago. I asked him if he knew the song.  I think I then started a bacchanalian monologue about my great-grandfather, about his kick-ass Francophonism and extraordinary equestrian talent, but the immigration officer just held his finger to his lips and asked for my papers. He checked my documents and sternly told me that I couldn’t be in two places at the same time. I had no idea what he meant, though for a moment, I imagined the parallel universe that would grant me the ability to be at two places at the same time. It was wonderful, but it wasn’t Earth. After a lengthy argument with another immigration official about the ability to be in two places at the same time, (I think they determined that this was possible in Latin America, but not the United States. A Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel might have been proof) and a lengthier bag check, they decided that I was okay to fly. I was the last person to board and everyone on the plane seemed to be scowling at me. Five minutes later the plane jerked alive, and I promptly grabbed the puke bag. The Frenchman next to me squirmed and swore. I decided that I would not tell him about my great-grandfather. Hours later, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, or what I thought should be the Gulf of Mexico, I looked out the window and noticed that the sea touched the sky and the sky was blue and alien and kamikaze. I imagined that in the distant future the world would end there and this, somehow, put my nausea at ease. The Frenchman sitting next to me didn’t want to sit next to me anymore and he asked the stewardess if he could change seats.

Trains are a wonderful civic institution. We should all be thankful that we live in a city with trains. The City of Trains, to be exact. But they are also a romantic institution. The saddest films of the 40’s end in train stations. Most immigrants who arrived in Chicago during its first 100 years came by train. On her way to work, my mother reads romance novels on the train. Proof enough. Trains serve as interludes between one experience and the next, and there is nothing more romantic than anticipation.  Riding a train is like reading a poem that ends just where it needs to.

I thought for sure that I would feel like I was home at last after riding the L for the first time in a year and half. But somehow, it didn’t work. After living in the Andes, everything in Chicago seemed too flat, too immense. The Windy City, I always forget, is immense on a mythological scale. It has the sheer will of a Titan. It felt discouragingly unfamiliar after the density and remoteness of the mountains. I rode around the Loop and watched a whirlwind of passengers get on and off and waited for the end of my unfamiliar poem.

It wasn’t until two weeks later when I was driving around Logan Square on Kedzie Avenue that I felt like I had arrived home. It was a near-tropical, pellucid August night and in the distance Henry Bacon’s eagle monument shone his piercing gaze on the neighborhood. I was stopped at a light and a white construction van pulled up next to me.  I noticed that a man inside was watching me. He looked Eastern-European, a man from the Ural Mountains or a Serb with his own ghosts (ones constantly babbling about the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the best way to cook a pig). He motioned for me to roll down my window. I did. He then yelled something, but I couldn’t understand what. In the distance, a siren sounded. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled back, “WHAT?” He yelled again, “Hey asshole, your lights are out!” He then smirked the way only a Chicagoan can – after helping and insulting you at the same time, which, in my mother’s Chicago Jewish family is as common as breaking bread, so, sure, it feels good. It feels comfortable. I know this. I know how to respond. “Thanks shithead!” I yelled back.  The light turned green and the Balkan sped off, a benevolent force in the twilight.  I turned on my headlights and reminded myself of the following: No matter who the hell you are or where in the damn world you’ve been, you’re still an asshole with his lights turned off.

Oh yeah, I thought and pressed on the accelerator, I’m definitely home.

Photo by Daniel Schwen

Andrei Codrescu in his wonderful and poetic collection of essays about his adopted city, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City,says he fell in love with New Orleans, “At first sight, violently.” While reading New Orleans, Mon Amour, I saw a little of myself in his writing and his love for a city that captures his attention so vividly and serves so much like a muse. So, with this column, Last Evenings on Earth, Chicago will serve as my muse. She’s the city I know best and the city I can’t seem to put out of my mind.

Like New Orleans, Chicago was built at the hub of an ancient river system and on a swamp, at first thought a seemingly impossible Athenian task, but one accomplished through pure will of civilization. And when we say civilization in Chicago we’re talking about the Renaissance, the ideal, the light of the horizon. The impossible and the nearly-impossible effort to progress. Upward and onward. This is what Mark Twain knew when he wrote the following in his famous travelogueLife On The Mississippi:  “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago – she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”  Chicago is the ideal place to write from and write about. It has the Renaissance novelty of constant change (like nature, like the universe) and a multiplicity of people and events that few cities in the world can match. In this sense, Chicago is a place where almost anything is possible, catastrophic or breathtaking (sometimes both), a city built over metaphysical rivers. I can’t help but think of the gorgeous Palmer house, for example, which burned down in the Great Chicago Fire just thirteen days after its opening, and how Potter Palmer immediately set to work re-building after the fire. Or I can’t help but think of how Chicago played center-stage to the formation of jazz and blues, the only real universal music of the century, with its own historical force, captured in the roars and cyclones of Howlin’ Wolf and the sorrows and sense of Muddy Waters. And, of course, I can’t help but think of how all of this history unfolds in personal moments throughout my life. On a crowded and nerve-wracking bus ride in Ecuador to visit my grandfather in Guaranda, a friend of mine handed me a copy of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch to help keep me mind off what seemed like an impending avalanche, and I came across the following passage:  “And now a cracked voice, making its way out of a worn-out record, suggesting unknowingly that old Renaissance invitation, that old Anacreontic sadness, a carpe diem from Chicago 1922.

Skin like darkness, baby, you gonna die some day,

Skin like darkness, baby, you gonna die some day,

I jus’ want some lovin’ be-fore you go your way.

Every so often the words of the dead fit the thoughts of the living…”

Suddenly, as if in a dreamscape, I was transplanted from the Andes to Chicago, and although I was obviously not alive in 1922, I knew that feeling, the feeling ofcarpe diem the City evokes, the feeling that ghosts hustle bygone street-corners and recite poetry to the living. Somewhere in Chicago, in 1922, my Jewish great-grandparents must have heard these lyrics. They might have even danced. Or another memory of the City: riding on the L one glacial January afternoon, I noticed how shadows on skyscrapers move at perfect angles, no doubt, a consequence of the art of architecture, but I had never thought of this before, the geometry of shadows or the shadows of a city without end. Now, it’s all I can think about. Or the way a Serbian driver in a white van told me I was an asshole because my car lights were out, “Assssss-hooooole,” smirking spectacularly, the way only a Chicagoan can smirk. Or a midnight drink in The Gingerman Tavern with a friend I haven’t seen in two years. Or seeking solace and comfort at 4AM at a diner on Western Avenue (that inexhaustible street) after a feral night out with friends, after a shift driving a delivery truck downtown, or after discovering an old student of mine was sentenced to twenty five years. And, of course, my father’s jewelry and casting shop, the center of the world when I was a child.  All in all, it makes perfect sense that I fell in love with Chicago over a long period of time. Our city is a slow roast. You need time here. It’s a heartbreaking place in its savagery and, yet, it’s also a relentless savior to those who just need a place to show up. To be sure, I might not be here my whole life, and, in fact, I’ve left quite a few times, but it’s the only city that’ll take me back. And that’s why I come back. It’s the only city I could love like this. Over time, metaphysically. The way a young reader falls in love with an epic novel or the way an astronomer falls in love with the discovery of a new planet or a new sun, a swirling flambeau, the possibility of a parallel universe.

Photo by Flickr user Crowbert

One night, at a restaurant, I think, called Paz, somewhere off of Division, I had said or done something and it hadn’t been what I’d said or done necessarily, but it had been an addendum to other things, careless, inconsiderate things – things that had grown like an appendage on an embryo. The waitress, a tall and spindly woman, came over to see if everything was alright. Marina had, or I had, I don’t remember, slammed a near-full glass down on the table and the juice, I remember it was jugo de mana, pulpy and florid, spilled on the table. Anyway, Marina said we were sorry and she was sorry and she gave the waitress a generous tip and hugged her. I’d never seen someone actually hug a waitress before. After Marina stormed off, I’m sure I thought our relationship was over.

Later that night Marina came over and although her eyes had softened, she was still angry and I felt terrible and incompetent, a satire of a younger version of myself, a Don Quixote. But I listened to her injuries and I agreed with her and knowing that I needed more (more than myself, I thought sadly at the time) I brought out a bottle of wine and put on Sam Cooke. The song Sentimental Reasons played and then Tenderness, which is basically a list of the things I should’ve done in my relationship with Marina. But it’s a good song and there’s a sweet and short and sympathetic piano that accompanies Sam Cooke’s voice, which carries multitudes of loneliness and warning. So, in Tenderness, Sam Cooke is really singing some sense.

She cried a little and smiled – a soft and sure lunette – and then slipped her hand into the crook of my arm. I told her that I was sorry and I meant it and we danced for some time in my apartment, which was on the 10^th floor of a complex and faced the Lake and, that night, we could see the luna and the firmament of the eastern horizon, which was torpid and indigo, and that meant clouds were forming and a light summer rain would follow.

And this is how it was for two more weeks – almost all we listened to at night was Sam Cooke – until she told me without anger or guilt, her eyes just beautiful, just empyrean and full of luz, that she was moving back to Mexico City. She did go, at the end of that summer, and the next time I saw her was nearly twelve years later at a market on Chicago and Rockwell, and she was with a little girl, her daughter, who had the same lunette smile, and Marina hugged me we talked about how to pick out the best avocados, something I still don’t understand. I never saw Marina again and just before my father passed away last year he told me to marry the first woman I met who was nice, really nice, to waitresses because it says more than anything else you could ever find out about a person, it really does, he said, like it was a hard won secret, like I’d be an idiot not to listen.