We’re generally fairly quiet during the week but drink and swear and talk like pirates most every weekend. We ride bicycles drunk and wear lampshades on our heads. I like sleeping in the back of trucks and peeing from high places.
Bob lived in Humboldt Park (well, not actually in the park itself), located on the northwest side of the city. The direct train I caught from the airport was the movie-star one that travels high above the street and has featured in more movies than Mel Gibson.
There was no doubt that I was in America. On the ten-minute walk to Bob’s place I passed two McDonalds, a Dunkin’ Donuts, a Pizza Hut, a KFC and lots of Americans with huge butts. Bob wasn’t due home for another hour (he was an elementary school teacher and finished at three o’clock), so I grabbed a beer from Bob’s very own ground-floor liquor store and sat on his doorstep on the street. It was hotter and more humid than it had been in Rio and I soon discarded my shoes and socks and peeled off my shirt. When people walking by kept giving me a wide berth, I suddenly realised that it wasn’t just the sight of my pasty bare chest. Here I was sitting on a doorstep surrounded by plastic bags, drinking a bottle of beer from a brown paper bag and in desperate need of a wash and shave.
Twenty minutes later Greg Kinnear pulled up in front of me on a bicycle. It wasn’t the Hollywood actor, though. It was my host Bob, who shared the same clean-cut, blue-eyed, American-as-apple-pie look, complete with matching dimpled smile. The GlobalFreeloaders site doesn’t have profile pics, so I really had no idea what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect a man who likes sleeping in the back of trucks and peeing from high places to look like a handsome Hollywood star.
Bob’s second floor, three-bedroom apartment was not too shitty at all (on his profile he said that he lived in a shitty apartment). He shared it with Carl (‘he does some sort of shit with computers’) and his brother Jason (‘he does some sort of shit with wood’). ‘We’ve got a sweet-ass deal,’ Bob beamed. ‘We only pay two hundred and sixty dollars each a month rent.’ The reason Bob got such a sweet-ass deal was that less than a decade ago Humboldt Park was considered a ghetto. Gang activity, crime and violence dominated the area. ‘A few years ago all the hipsters moved in and it became cool,’ he said. ‘But now all the fucking Sex and the City wannabes are moving in.’
My couch looked very comfortable even though it was in the middle of a barren and desolate desert. The walls in the lounge room were floor-to-ceiling panoramic poster prints of the vivid red spires and stark landscape of Monument Valley. Except for one wall, which was draped with a huge American flag.
Over a couple of beers I learnt that Bob earns $45 000 a year teaching English as a second language to Puerto Ricans and Mexicans at Cicero Elementary School. I also learnt that he was counting down the days until his contract ended (he had 154 days to go), when he planned to buy a van and earn money driving backpackers around the country. Finally I learnt that his obsession with 1970s Schwinn bicycles had turned out to be rather lucrative.
‘I buy old ones from classified ads in the newspaper, then do them up and sell them,’ Bob explained as we stepped into a long, drafty storeroom off the lounge room. Inside at least twenty Schwinn bikes were in various stages of deconstruction and reconstruction. ‘They don’t make ’em like this anymore,’ Bob said as he pointed out the solid and heavy-framed Black Phantom, Stingray and Scrambler. ‘And now they’ve become cool again, I can make good money,’ he said. ‘The money I make will help finance my next big trip.’ Bob went on to tell me about one of his early entrepreneurial schemes, which had paid for a twelve-month jaunt around the States. In his senior year at high school he made $20 000 by selling dope to his fellow students.
While we were chatting, the phone rang. It was a potential buyer. Ten minutes later a fellow turned up looking to buy a bike as a birthday present for his wife. He rode the vibrant green Scrambler across the road and back again, then said, ‘I’ll take it’. Bob had bought the bike for $35 and, after ‘fixing it up a little’, had resold it for $150.
‘I only put the ad on Craigslist this morning,’ Bob beamed.
‘What’s Craigslist?’ I asked.
‘I’ll show you.’ Bob opened up the site on his computer. Craigslist.org had links for cities all over the world and had everything from Cars for Sale to Lost and Found, Houses for Sale to Positions Vacant, and travel deals to personals, including an incredibly explicit ‘Casual Encounters’ section. ‘Check this out!’ Bob said with his trademark cheeky smile. He showed me the Women seeking Men section, which was more like Women Desperately Seeking Men RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE! Many of the women who had posted requests were after an immediate response:
Petite girl wants to play
Can’t host, but my boyfriend is asleep and I want to head out. He passed out drunk. I want to suck a big cock. Only reply if you are hung.
‘Let’s go cruising,’ Bob purred. He didn’t mean for horny girls on Craigslist, though. Bob was pointing to his two most prized Schwinn bicycles. Bob snagged the very hipster-looking Schwinn Chopper (complete with gear stick) while I had the menacing-looking Black Phantom. We cruised to a Middle Eastern restaurant, where we ate falafels and talked about Americans in the Middle East. ‘The US defense policy is fucking ridiculous,’ Bob bellowed through a mouthful of hummus. ‘This country could be a paradise. We could use the money those idiots spend on invading countries on social services and education.’ Bob didn’t like George Bush much either. ‘That fucker is responsible for everyone in the world hating Americans,’ he spat.
After dinner we went on a pub crawl, or pub pedal in this case, and stopped at one of the outdoor bars on West Division Street. Although it was a Tuesday night, the place was packed. ‘Everyone is out because it’s usually freezing this time of the year,’ Bob said.
The next pub we stopped at was a bordello-styled pub, all dark pillars and heavy purple curtains. Just when I was telling Bob that I was getting a bit peckish, a scruffy-looking Mexican chap strolled in with a bag full of hot tomale. Although Bob’s description of tomale didn’t sound too appetising—corn leaves wrapped around corn mash and lard—it was pretty tasty as far as lard and mash go. We grabbed the last few before the guy sold out. ‘He’s really popular,’ Bob explained. ‘But not as popular as the Muffin Lady.’ The Muffin Lady went from pub to pub with a basket full of delicious baked goodies. But instead of blueberry muffins, hers were Moroccan black. ‘You’d be stoned after one muffin,’ Bob said. ‘She’s not around anymore, though. She got busted with ten thousand dollars’ worth of cannabis in the back of her car and now she’s in jail.’
On the ride home Bob had another go at George Bush and the Republicans. ‘If they get in again,’ Bob barked as we trundled down the street, ‘I’m going to strap a bomb on and go to the biggest church in South Dakota and blow the fuckers up, because they’re the one’s voting them in.’
‘Yo bro! Whassup?’
No, too ghetto.
‘Ey, ’ow ya doin’?’
No, too New York.
‘Howdy partner.’
No, too cowboy.
I had to get my American accent right because I was about to be Bob for the day. Bob had given me his teacher’s photo-ID card, which granted free entry to 54 Chicago museums and galleries. Bob didn’t seem to think there would be any problem with my total lack of resemblance to Greg Kinnear.
Bob lent me one of his bikes, but not one of his Schwinn classics. ‘The city is full of bike thieves,’ he grunted.
‘You’ll need to take a couple of these,’ Bob said, opening a drawer that was filled with an array of bike locks. Bob grabbed two different locks then demonstrated how to put them on. It was all rather complicated and involved wrapping a thick steel cable around the wheels then fixing a clamp through the cable and around a bike rack. ‘Take the seat with you when you lock it up,’ he said. ‘Those fuckers will steal anything.’
Bob told me that it would take 30 minutes to ride into the city. It took me ten, but I may have cheate
d a little. While I was having breakfast it began raining and I readily concede that I’m a lily-livered wimp when it comes to getting rained on, so I put the bike on the train.
I came up out of Jackson station and all around me the city’s workforce was streaming in and out of the ‘L’ trains and swarming away along a dank State Street underneath the bulky steel elevated train line. It was all eerily familiar, but there was something missing. Ahh, that was it. There were no high-speed car chases or cops having shoot-outs with nasty crime gangs. Pity, really.
It was only a five-minute ride along to my first foray into a life of crime as an ID fraudster. Still, even with the prospect of a prison sentence hanging over my head, I was looking forward to visiting the Art Institute of Chicago. Being a devoted habitué of art galleries and a great admirer of the French Impressionists, I knew that it housed the largest collection of French Impressionists outside the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Plus it would get me out of the rain.
‘Hey dude, I’m a teacher,’ I blurted out as I flashed Bob’s card to the young hipster behind the ticket desk.
What was I saying? No normal person says ‘dude’.
‘There you go, dude,’ he said as he handed me my ticket.
Seeing paintings in the flesh after studying them in books for years is like meeting your favourite Hollywood star face-to-face. The Art Institute of Chicago is full of ‘celebrity’ paintings including A Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat; Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles and Self-portrait, 1887; Grant Wood’s American Gothic; and more than 30 paintings by Monet. There weren’t nearly enough famous paintings for some people, though. An old lady tottered up next to me while I was admiring a Pissarro painting and she said to her friend, ‘Is this famous?’
‘No,’ said her friend.
The old lady, who didn’t even bother looking at the painting, then said, ‘Can you tell me when we get to a famous one?’
I wandered around for three hours and what amazed me the most was that not a single person even batted an eyelid at the fact that I was waltzing around cradling a bicycle seat. I soon discovered, however, that Bob wasn’t being paranoid after all and that someone was going to be in for a mighty surprise when they went to ride their bicycle home. All that was left of the bike that had been chained next to mine was the frame, which was the only thing secured to the bike rack. Both wheels were gone. And so was the seat.
Next stop was the third-tallest building in the world—the 110-storey Sears Tower had been the tallest building in the world until 1996, when it was usurped. At least it was easy to find. The third-tallest building on earth is always there, wherever you look. Telescopic in design, its square shoulders fall away at certain points, relieving the monotony of its huge black surface. It’s amazing to think that this immense, hi-tech building was built as a monument to the old-fashioned mail-order business that brought anvils, gravestones, wigs, steam engines, girdles and entire kit-houses into people’s homes across America.
From the 103rd-floor Skydeck, Lake Michigan looked like an ocean and the city’s vast grid of streets were as plain as a map with little silver glints of river and canal, and tiny toy railroads snaking away to the prairies. The other giants of the skyscraper world looked tiny in comparison—including the John Hancock building, which, at 100 storeys, is no skyscraping slouch. Then my absorption in the newfangled world of steel and glass was interrupted by the oldfangled world of straw hats and white bonnets. A family of Amish folk were wandering around the Skydeck looking totally dumbfounded, eyes wide open with childish wonder. The men had Abraham Lincolnesque long pointy beards and bowl haircuts, while the women—all of the women—were wearing aprons. Both the men’s and the women’s clothes were held together by pins. I’d seen the film Witness, so I knew that they couldn’t use buttons because they are deemed a ‘modern convenience’. It seems soap and deodorant are also deemed a modern convenience, because boy oh boy did they smell. This family may well have scorned buttons and soap, but there was one modern convenience they were more than happy to fully embrace. Dad was slurping on a McDonalds thick shake while the kids were fighting over a bag of McNuggets and fries.
Bob told me that it would take 30 minutes to ride back to his place. It took me more than an hour. But that was because the grid layout of the city was so ridiculously easy to follow that I somehow managed to get lost. When I got back Bob was already home from school and busily pulling apart a bike in his ‘workshop’. ‘I do most of my bike repairs here,’ Bob said as he sipped a beer. He certainly had plenty of space. Bob’s workshop was out the front of the apartment on the footpath. Sorry, in America it’s a sidewalk. Or a pavement if you’re English. I love the fact that even though Americans, English and Australians speak the same language we can have three different names for the same thing.
When I came back from the dunny, I mean the loo, I mean the john, Bob was chatting to his ‘friend’ Bruce, who went to the liquor store at the same time every day to buy his two cans of beer. ‘All the drunks in the area know me,’ Bob said, ‘because they pass me on the way to the liquor shop.’ Most of Bob’s ‘friends’ were, as Bob called them, ‘black dudes’.
‘They love me,’ Bob grinned. ‘Because I chat to them and buy them a beer now and again.’
‘Hey Bob, you got a dollar?’
This was Robert who, according to Bruce, was ‘as old as shit’ and ‘as dumb as shit’. Robert did look a bit worse for wear. ‘See his fingers?’ Bruce chuckled, pointing to Robert’s lack of fingers on one hand. ‘He got ’em stuck to a pole.’ Robert had flaked out drunk on the street one night in the middle of the bitterly cold Chicago winter and had tried to get up by grabbing a pole. His hand froze against the post and three fingers had to be amputated to get him off.
I asked Bob to take me to an authentic Chicagoan restaurant for dinner, so we got in his truck and drove to Azteca Tacos Restaurant in Little Mexico. It was at least very authentic Mexican. The restaurant was hot and steamy and the tables and chairs were cheap and tatty. Bob ordered in Spanish. ‘No one speaks English here,’ he shrugged. We were served enough food for four people—or the immense lady who was the only other diner. As we gorged on homemade guacamole and corn chips, beans, rice, fajitas and an entire fish cooked in lime juice, I asked Bob about Chicago’s notorious crime rate.
‘We’re currently ranked number three for murders,’ Bob said proudly. ‘After Miami and Orlando.’
Chicago did make it to number one in 2001, Bob told me, but the mayor wasn’t happy so he demanded that there be a recount on the basis that the 9/11 deaths should have been included in the New York figures.
‘Are there many gangs around this area?’ I asked Bob.
‘A few, but Southside is where most of the crazy-ass ghetto motherfuckers are.’
After dinner we drove back to Bob’s, jumped on the bikes and went for a ride to see some crazy-ass ghetto motherfuckers. Southside is the ‘The Black Metropolis’ of Chicago and, with an African–American population of around 90 per cent, a couple of whiteys on pushbikes stood out somewhat. It also became quite obvious that we were entering a dodgy part of town. Monstrous concrete housing blocks covered in graffiti loomed over streets littered with abandoned cars, old refrigerators and burnt-out couches.
There was some serious loitering going on, including kids walking in the middle of the busy road while cars swerved around them. ‘They’ve got such a shitty life,’ Bob explained. ‘That walking on the road is just a way of saying “fuck you” to everyone.’ Most of the kids were doing the whole hip-hop look, i.e. they looked as if they were wearing their older (and much larger) brother’s clothes.
‘Don’t look at them,’ Bob said gravely. ‘And whatever you do, don’t stop!’
‘Is it safe?’ I asked warily.
‘Not really. Friends say I’m crazy riding through here,’ Bob said matter-of-factly. ‘I had a bottle thrown at me once.’
I stared at Bob in dismay.
‘They’ve got t
hose now, though.’ Bob pointed to a pole on the corner with a blue flashing light on top. The flashing poles were set up on just about every corner and Bob explained that these recently installed anti-crime cameras were capable of pinpointing gunshot sounds, calculating where the shots were fired, and pointing and zooming the cameras in the direction of the shots within a two-block radius. That’s all very well, I thought, but all it meant was that the police would get some nice footage of a bullet passing through my head.
When we got back, I finally met Bob’s flatmate Carl, who was an African–American but not, Bob assured me, a crazy-ass ghetto motherfucker. Carl was heading out to a friend’s buck’s party. ‘We don’t call it that!’ Carl chuckled. ‘We call it a bachelor party. A buck in America is a BIGGGG black man!’
I felt a little guilty about appropriating the couch when Carl told me that his good friend Chuck from out of town was also staying the night. ‘It’s okay, he’ll sleep on the Lazy Boy,’ Carl shrugged.
Carl wobbled in at three in the morning with a tottering Chuck in tow. I offered Carl’s friend the much more commodious couch because Chuck was one hell of a buck. He was about twice the size of the Lazy Boy lounger. He declined my offer, but although he had to lie on a 45-degree angle with his feet dangling off the end, he looked surprisingly comfortable. If Chuck had actually remembered his night’s sleep, he’d probably have given the Lazy Boy a good score on LazyBoySurfing.com. Chuck’s snooze did, however, have a knock-on effect on the below-average score I gave Bob’s couch:
Couch rating: 7½/10
Pro: Bob’s long and capacious couch
Con: Chuck’s long and cacophonous snoring
Everything in America is big. I spent most of the day surrounded by immensity. In the morning I went to a colossal laundromat where huge black ladies were throwing enormous pairs of underpants into gargantuan washing machines. The laundromat had 82 washing machines and 68 dryers (I was a little bored, so I counted them all). There were also six large-screen televisions playing former super-sized and now super-rich Oprah.
Sleeping Around Page 9