|
The plan, however tenuous, is to catch up with a few friends from high school who are living in the city now. One is a girl I sort of sold on hockey back when I was known as my class's #1 Hawks fan. These years were 2002-2004. You can guess there wasn't a #2. My friends, however, are often huge flakes, and I'm terrible at planning myself, so before I even board the Metra I have that suspicion that the day will be less social outing and more social anthropology.
I board a North Central train in Prospect Heights at 7:25. A later consultation of the timetable says it left Antioch at 6:45 and made four other stops before mine. I can see from the platform that the cars are rather full, and the urban planning enthusiast in me has to smile at the thought of our rail infrastructure being maximized if only for one silly day. About twenty of us are getting on at various entrances. I choose the one where I can't make it out of the vestibule. That's trouble. A girl with turquoise highlights and body glitter immediately says hi, and asks if I'm there for the parade. I say yes. She says she is too, fuck yeah, and gives me a big hug. Subsequent to establishing physical contact, she asks me what my name is. I'm not awake enough to lie yet, so I answer truthfully. She says her name is Stacy, and launches into “Stacy's Mom.” A few of us join in; why not. Over the course of the conversation, she changes her name several times, so much like with the obvious drinking, it's not too early for her to make shit up. She asks where I'm from. I say Arlington Heights. She hails from Zimbabwe. I question this. She affirms, and asks what am I, a fuckin' racist. She will now call me a fuckin' racist forever, she warns, brandishing a surely adulterated two-liter of store-brand cola in one hand and gripping a similarly adulterated 20-oz iced tea (I suspect) in the other. Eventually, she makes it through the doors to hold court on the staircase. I talk to some other members of her party.
ME
She's really had a lot already, huh.
TATTOOED GENTLEMAN 1
No, that's the thing. She hasn't. That's just how she is.
TATTOOED GENTLEMAN 2
Nah, dude, she's pretty drunk.
TATTOOED GENTLEMAN 1
...oh.
ME
Mmm.
I ask one of the other girls where they all got on. Her words say Buffalo Grove, but the coarseness of their day-drinking says Round Lake Beach. All in all, though, I guess Turquoise Stacy is holding her liquor pretty well, figuratively and literally. Certainly better than two of the other girls from their group. It's about 7:35 a.m. now. One girl is drinking water or vodka from an Ice Mountain bottle, and has a terrible case of thousand-yard stare. Hanging from her and a support bar is a second girl, this one in fluorescent wayfarers and tie-dye who cannot be more than seventeen, and she is obviously in bad, bad shape. I look over to a girl not dressed in Hawks regalia, also stuck in the vestibule with me since Prospect Heights, and give her that universal cringe-y expression of mutually knowing hell's coming to breakfast. She gives it back.
It's not that I can't spare the five bucks for a round trip, but I'm a little disappointed when the conductor hits up the vestibule for fares. T.S., back from blocking the stairs, asks the conductor his name so she can tell him by name what a hell of a job he's doing. I get to talking to the tattooed gentlemen about their plans for the rest of the day, namely what they're going to do between now and the parade. Mostly drinking. Of course. One is taking a train to Ravinia after the parade to see Darius Rucker. The other asks who that is. I inform him of Darius's history with Hootie & The Blowfish and his solo career. “He did a Burger King commercial. It got pretty annoying.”
I was kinda hoping Ravinia wouldn't come up today. My first date/anniversary day was at Ravinia, June 28th in our last summer of Stanley, and approximately 80% of the reason I'm doing something so out of character today is to not dwell on the past and to immerse myself in our shared civic happiness instead. It's funny, though: she and I saw the CSO playing the music of Chopin, then Monday became Tuesday, which by any metric made the first date an unqualified success. By morning, we decided to put the TV on, which, being a hotel television, automatically came on at channel 2. Take careful inventory of all the time/place details here and see if you can put the puzzle together. Yes, there I was, riding high on adrenaline and the spring-loaded love of a long-deferred long-distance relationship, having to explain to this wonderful but non-native girl why in our World-Class City, a virtually inscrutable hot dog vendor and a 400-pound black man were hosting our local morning news-slash-financial program. You know you're a Scorehead when...this. All things considered, I was lucky she waited until well after that morning to leave me forever.
Back on the train, the two intertwined drunk B.G. girls are having difficulty keeping balance on the bumpy track. The Metra Electric is a strange mutant baby of a railroad, but its smooth ride and lack of diesel fumes would be a boon to the current situation. We're only now coming up on O'Hare. The older and more with-it girl begins kissing the more obviously struggling girl, but it's not in a turn-on-the-guys way so much as an I-genuinely-care-about-this-girl-very-much way. It might be her little sister. The other guys must realize this, as they are not interested. Neither am I, to be honest.
There's now enough space on the seating side of the sliding doors for me to fraternize over there for a while. An older man in a Hawks sweater talks some hockey with me, the first time all morning. I engage in more disjointed but largely forgettable small talk with T.S., culminating in “Oh, you're killin' me, [name]! Nah. You're just illin' me.” She asks for directions to the “laboratory”; I point her through the vestibule and into the opposite half of the car. I slide through myself to make sure she doesn't get lost along the way, and to monitor the escalating girl-girl situation.
The underager is on noodle legs, aggravated by the bumps and shimmies. We're around Rosemont now, which isn't a stop so much as an industrial yard with a staircase from the street above. The older girl is asking for water. No, not vodka, actual water, as she rejects one Ice Mountain squirt bottle. She holds a second bottle up to the younger girl's lips as if to nurse her. “Take little sips,” she coos. The sips don't appear that little.
Only by jumping backward and onto the steps behind me do I avoid getting splattered with vomit. I get lucky, as far as negotiating other people's vomit goes, and only get a little bit on the edge of my left shoe. Underage drinking gone horribly wrong and getting worse is one of those situations where everyone, regardless of intoxication level, is sort of shocked and scared shitless into superficial lucidity, and so the Buffalo Grove drinking team is now on what will have to pass for high alert. The older girl, her eyes having gone from dead to darting, rushes her friend/sister into the bathroom. One of the tattooed gentlemen takes the remainder of the bottled water and squirts the vomit away, or at least down the opposite steps from me. Again, his awareness not being as profound as it perhaps ought to be, he later steps down and finds himself slip-sliding in the very vomit he tried to clean, to the horror and consternation of his friends. This isn't just gross, I learn; it's a transgression of borrowed shoes.
The Ravinia-bound tattooed gentleman is nowhere to be found at this point. I note to the second one that I am very worried about that girl. I learn she had been at it since 3 in the morning, as yet another girl chimes in that “she's just getting ready for Round Two.” I reply that I don't think so, or at least certainly hope not. Significant time passes with no sign of the two girls who went to the bathroom. He asks me where we are now, but then answers himself by saying we're in Roselle. I tell him Roselle's not on our line, and that if that was Montclare just now, we're in the city limits, so fairly close to the end. The rest of the group is planning what they will do once they get to Union Station. I don't pick up on everything, but somehow it involves the big water fountain under the staircase. I'm not sure I like where this is going. I turn back to the non-Hawks girl standing on the steps with me. “Remember when no one liked hockey?”, I ask her. She laughs. “Simpler times.”
It was inevitable, but it's right about now I start thinking about the Bernstein column and how we should enjoy the Stanley Cup in polite privacy, without feeling we need to celebrate the communal experience of sports. I kind of see his point. Of course, I also see residual vomit.
The puke-shoed tattooed gentleman is now losing his shit over the disappearance of the two girls. I intuit that the older one is his girlfriend. When they finally emerge, he erupts over the fact that they were nowhere to be seen. She protests that she was taking care of her best friend in the whole world (asked and answered) when she was sick. In exaggerated mouthing, she silent-shouts across the vestibule to her friends, “she puked all over the bathroom floor.” Perhaps that was Round Two. The argument gets worse, hinting at dormant tensions that would have been revitalized by whatever was the next bad day their lives found. He yells and screams that he can't take care of all these people, while she continues to hammer home that all she was doing was looking after her best friend. As far as I can tell, the guy is drunk and not really making a cogent argument, while the girl, though also drunk, is on pretty solid ground with this. I consider chiming in to that effect, but he shouts at her that he shouldn't have to take this shit from her “when you have my name written on your hip.” Best I stay out, then. I take a sidelong glance at her hip. I don't see a name. She must have it pretty high up. We're at Western. He threatens to get off this fucking train right now, and does. The doors close. They open back up. He gets back on.
Meanwhile, the sick girl has passed out. Another guy from their group, which seems not to have a cap on its membership, has lifted her into his arms. It doesn't seem to be much of a strain, as her friends agree she can't be more than ninety pounds. Probably part of the reason we've come to this, I note. I ask T.S. if everyone is going to be okay and if they need someone to keep an eye on things. She says they should have it under control. She is no longer the bubbly girl I met 45 minutes ago.
Mercifully, we arrive at Union Station and head to the staircase. Walking alongside the big guy and the passed-out girl he's carrying, I tell him he's a mensch. He looks puzzled. My suspicions of non-Buffalo Grove origin are now all but confirmed. I turn my head for a second. I've lost the whole group in the crowd. It's a good thing I wasn't their spirit guide after all. As I ascend the stairs, everyone around me begins to do-do-doot the “Chelsea Dagger” chorus, apropos of nothing in particular but the day. I join in; why not.
Having arrived in Chicago, I've now encountered the most excitement of the day. Everything up to the parade and rally itself is largely without consequence. I'm in a sea of humanity at Grant Park, striking up happy conversations with total strangers and thinking about the column again, and how maybe it is all worth it. There's an implausible ubiquity of hockey sweaters on a hot summer day. Even with shorts, it's hardly weather-appropriate to be wearing heavy, long-sleeved, double-knit polyester, weighed down further by nameplates, numbers, and Indian Heads, so it's no surprise when some of the girls among us begin accounting for the heat. I keep from gawking by getting out my phone to try to catch up with some people, only to find that there is little to no service here, and so it appears I shan't be meeting anyone. My texting must be mistaken for clandestine picture-taking as a shirtless bro pushes some surrounding bodies aside, telling us to step back, we're intimidating his girl, bro. Upset with the misunderstanding and attack on my good character, I think about having a Schusterian argument over “intimidating,” or about how black Winter Classic sweater + bikini top represents some ill-thought-out layering, and that her pancake makeup provides a layering dilemma unto itself, but I just yell “oh, God, sorry, texting.” Done with the phone for the day.
The rally festivities take forever. The crowd has a distinct ECW feel to it, with two-tone-five-clap chants of “we can't hear you,” “re-sign Bickell,” “put your sign down,” and “shut the fuck up.” Pat Quinn gets by far the most hostile treatment, and it's earned, though I highly doubt much of this crowd tried to vote him out when they had the chance. I haven't hydrated all day, so I'm teetering on passing out myself by the time Foley introduces the players. Why is Ryan Stanton announced as a member of the team? I don't recall him playing in any games other than the callup dump in the meaningless last game against the Blues, but the rest of the Rockford guys are missing. In 2010 they recognized every single black ace, but it's just Stanton and Smith this time, and Smith at least played Game 3. Jamal Mayers gets his name called in what may be his final NHL function, and I don't recall him playing in the Stanley Cup, so I don't know what the requirements are this time. Carcillo gets more love than he should. I have to tell someone who Sheldon Brookbank is. The regulars get their appropriate reactions. Let's now face facts: Andrew Shaw has become a Chicago folk hero. Bolland is beloved, and I still hope this isn't the last we see of the little shit. Reactions for Crawford, Hossa, Kane, and Toews are deafening.
The crowd clears out fast after fireworks and a little more communal Daggering, and with just about enough stimulation to last a month, I need to de-compress. I duck into the Cultural Center to see that urban renewal exhibit I had been meaning to see. (And air conditioning. Sweet, sweet air conditioning.) As I predicted, this was not the kind of culture Chicagolanders were in town for today, and so I am the only one in the entire gallery. A security guard, having no one else to look after and likely suspecting me of yelling “WOOOOO SHAWZER FUCKIN' RIIIIIGHT” at any moment and tearing the whole exhibit down, is about five feet behind me every step of the way through all three rooms of the gallery and back out to the main lounge. I hope I disappointed him. I enjoyed the exhibit very much, though. Probably my favorite part of the whole day, to be perfectly honest. That or the sandwich I had from Arturo, which is really one of the better sandwich places in the Loop/West Loop, though I realize that's saying rather little.
I guess this was my supposedly fun thing I'll never do again. But I had to. I think we'll get one more Cup out of this group, but you can never say for sure, and so I'm glad I got to take in a great big Hawks party in five senses and three dimensions, just to say I did. Ten years ago, when I was listening to 670 alone in my room to hear if Steve Sullivan and Jocelyn Thibault could will us past the Columbus Blue Jackets into 12th place, I never thought I would see hundreds of thousands of Indian Heads all over downtown Chicago for the second time in four years. I'm not a bandwagon-hater—in fact, I love it—but it made me happy to know I bought in early on the team. Still, being an introvert in a vast sea of extroverts is really a shitty way to spend a day, and obligating myself into public Hawks fandom wasn't the best idea. It's not who I am, and it has nothing to do with the hours I logged watching the team. I'm not up for it. I guess it's a failure to be a full-fledged public person that I'll just have to live with. Any future championships will be celebrated the right way, without crush-loaded Metras, without public disrobing, without spontaneous song, without people, without life.
_________________ Molly Lambert wrote: The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
