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"Everything is so loveless and mediocre." --Phoebe Gloeckner
On New Year's Eve 1995 the Mekons played the Metro. T. had been dead a year. J. was in Los Angeles and had not called to tell me if he were coming home by then. I had met P. through Match.com, then in beta and long before it had become the AOL of dating, and asked him to the show. I wore a handmade midriff top from blue metallic material. We ate rice and beans, ice skated, and went to the club. All my friends were there. D. told her husband, "I bet you dollars to donuts something's gonna happen." P. and I wound up at his apartment and he fell backwards on his bed, saying, "I don't have anything here." I stayed there four days.
Nine years and a son later, it occurred to me that I should not have married the rebound guy. I put a bottle of tequila and a shotglass in my lunch bag, put a bottle of lorezapam in my pocket, and headed out in two degree weather without a jacket to the Cove.
I ordered two whiskey sours as warmup rounds. Around me was bar life as it always is in Chicago--the game on TV, the old regulars talking about how Vicodin messed them up, men trying to impress women, a patron studying the CD jukebox with care.
I left the Cove and headed down 55th to the Point. I walked to where it juts furthest into Lake Michigan. East, the grey lake met a deep blue sky; south were lights bending around into Indiana, and north were the ostentatious lights of downtown. I walked back around north to find a place to sit which was not covered with ice.
I found a suitable rock, poured a shot of tequila, took a lorezapam, and gazed at the lights to the north. I did not feel particularly cold. I looked at the waters and thought about my father's and brother's ashes which were consigned to them, and how I will some day join them. I thought a lot about E. A long history of unhappiness in love started with him. I was seventeen; we moved into together; under great pressure from his parents he abruptly kicked me out. We had rekindled our friendship this year after twenty years of silence. He remembers that time as a pleasant interlude on the way to manhood. I remember it as a first traumatic event of many.
I thought about T. It was ten years ago that day that he hanged himself--yes, on Christmas Day, the bastard. T. was scruffy, slightly discombobulated West Side Irish, a Chicago archetype. He was kind, generous, poor, an artist, a lover and a raconteur, and this was the only truly hostile act he had ever committed in his life. He is buried with his mother, who died when he was ten.
I thought about my brother, who died in my mother's arms on New Year's Day of leukemia. It had not even been a year that he was sick.
I stayed there a long while, looking at the sparkling, brittle lights which shone for no good reason on Chicago's North Side. Eventually I realized that despite my tears I wasn’t getting any colder, so I got up and walked home.
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