Page 291 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 279

Park and the hootenannies of Old Town and the jazz clubs of Rush
Street on the Near North Side. I stared at the lights shining from
the windows of the Playboy mansion on the Gold Coast and watched
the crowds coming and going at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, not yet pre-
pared to walk through any doors.
‘This is my philosophy: If you aren’t adjusted where you are,” I
told the Buncheks, “then go where the adjustment is.”
“So you studied philosophy,” Louisa said, “in a fortune cookie
factory.”
“I want to go where I want to go and do what I want to do.”
“Suit yourself,” Louisa said. “I’m staying put.”
“You need to get around a little more,” Joe said.
April descended on Chicago. My first spring. I was free and
ready to defrost. Blankets lay in the streets along the curbs where
drivers stuck in the blizzard had thrown them under their spinning
tires to escape. Little yellow crocuses bloomed around the edges of
dirty frozen snow drifts. Vine leaves grew in my pants. I walked
through people in the Loop. I sat with steaming coffee along the
cement walks and walls of the Chicago River the city dyed green
for Saint Patrick’s Day. I had never watched skyscrapers light up
by night. Never had I felt such wind. Evenings, coming back to
Louisa’s, I ran down the streets from the El train, jumping from pool
to pool of lamplight in the spring rain.
My one attic window, large and round, looked down on Magno-
lia Street, where cars maneuvered silently between two parked lanes
as furtive as great dark beasts hunting a curbside lair for the night.
I owned no car. I owned no house. I was free beyond belief. I felt
wickedly suspect: I was alone, rattlingly poor in someone else’s attic.
A dream come true. I had finally ended one world of my life. Every-
thing seemed possible. I wandered into coffee shops and bookstores,
watching people. I wrote notes in my yellow legal pads. A Journal.
Twice a week the double-feature changed at the Bryn Mawr Theater.
On the marquee at the Devon, A Thousand Clowns was in its second
year. Louisa rattled out the wonders of money and a good job. Her
middle son—my age—was a junior accountant in the Loop.
“I’m not sure yet how important money is to me,” I said. “Roof,
bread, tuition.”

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