Chicago Torch Songs

I.

There is an essay that begins this way:

Everyone has a place, a city or town that they remember only in a romantic way. Everyone has a place, a city or town that they remember only ever fondly, that they remember only ever having been happy in, beautiful in, well-liked and bewitching in.

But this is not that essay. This essay can't begin that way, because I want to write about the year I lived in Chicago six years ago. To start any piece with Chicago and only romance would be inaccurate, a lie, a tourist's story, not an inhabitant's. I love the city, that's true, but I still remember vividly the tricks it pulled on me, the way it forced some bit of bad luck on me nearly every month I lived there, so that, after a while, no matter how much affection I had for Chicago, it still felt like the city was always asking me to leave.

So my essay about my favorite place, city or town, would start more like this:

I moved to Chicago in September, and Chicago welcomed me by refusing to hook up my phone for the entire month and then for most of October too. Chicago introduced me to three men in October and November, all of whom were charming, all of whom I would have loved to know better, but all of whom were moving to New York City in a week or two. In December, Chicago stole the luggage rack, the spare tire, the passenger-side rear-view mirror off my car—and though Chicago was nice enough to at least leave my radio antenna behind, it would have been a better gesture if Chicago hadn't unscrewed it and raked it down the whole length of the car before throwing it where I might find it later in a snowdrift at the curb.

For the month of January, Chicago left me more or less alone, but then in the middle of February it mugged me on my way to the El, taking my wallet and pushing me to the ground so hard that when I caught myself, my teeth knocked against each other, chipping the pointed ends off both my canines. And the very next day, Chicago told me that my apartment was being converted to condos and served me an eviction notice.

March and May were fairly uneventful, but Chicago more than made up for that oversight by leaving a man for me to discover, bloodied and dying two blocks from my apartment. And though I feel more than a little uneasy claiming that as my bad luck when it was so much more his, had Chicago let him be found by someone better equipped to handle such an emergency, the outcome might have been different and that guilt, or rather this guilt, would belong to that person, not me.

Stop here and hold on this scene:

A young woman is sitting on a sidewalk north of the Loop, holding the hand of a man whom she doesn't know at all, holding the hand of a man who is slipping irrevocably away from being a man at all. He doesn't speak—maybe he is incapable of drawing in the breath needed to push out again into the weight of words. Blood is seeping from his chest, and she doesn't know whether he was stabbed or shot, though it hardly seems to matter. She does know that she shouldn't move him but can't help sliding her lower calf beneath his head anyway so he's at least able to rest against something softer and warmer than the concrete of the sidewalk. And when she speaks, all she can say is, Hold on. Please hold on, because she heard those lines in movies and in TV shows, and if she can think of this moment as scripted, then she won't be here...