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South Side, or: The Culture of Fear, or: I’m a Big Wuss

Longtime readers of this blog have, I’m sure, drawn many strange and accurate conclusions about me. Chief among them: I’m sort of paranoid. I like to think of myself as “cautious,” but I’m apparently not a very good judge of character. So, when I learned two weeks ago that my fiction writing professor was having a going-away party today (she’s moving to Maine) at a house on 77th Street, I decided to cautiously not go.

Then, my friend Anne said, “I think I’m going to go to that party.”

I said, “Yeah, me too.”

I didn’t do this because I’m trying to impress her with my faux world weariness, even though I am. I did it because sometimes my sense of machismo gets in the way of common sense. If this had been anyone else, I would’ve said, “Are you fucking crazy?” But I, as sworn protector of any female polite enough to not openly disdain my physical appearance, decided I had a duty to her. I wasn’t going to allow her to go to an unfamiliar neighborhood on the south side by herself.

So I trudged downtown in the snow, met her at the Van Buren Street Metra station, and we took a train down to the stop at and 75th Street and Exchange Avenue, approximately 62 blocks away from the farthest south I’ve ever gone in the city of Chicago. As a result of many years being bred to fear everything by both my parents and the news media, I was terrified.

The train station, according to a very misleading map, was about three blocks away from where we needed to be. According to reality, it’s more like six. This may not seem like a lot, but it is when you’re terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought (™ Egon).

The platform and station house looked abandoned, which fit well with the overall aesthetic of the neighborhood. In the station house itself, I swear to God there was a large, rusting sign that said “Attention: Purse Snatchers,” with a little blurb and a large picture of a purse with a big red circle and slash. A positive sign, I’m sure.

I led Anne west onto 75th, as I had spent many long hours consulting the misleading map, and I knew Marquette Avenue was a block away.

I was wrong. As a matter of fact, there was no street a block away. Just one run-down, closed-up-and-barred-shut business after another. And the few businesses that were — gasp! — open after noon on a Saturday were similarly barred or at least had steel shutters blocking the windows and doors. Not really a good sign. Plus, the addresses were in the 2500’s and going down as we headed west.

“I think we went the wrong way,” I said quietly. The street was empty, almost to the point of being desolate (there was one guy standing on the corner who looked like he was waiting for a ride, but he was balanced out by the cop car parked right in front of him), but I still figured I should be as quiet as possible. In case some random person was hiding in the shadows somewhere, it seemed like a bad idea to let slip that I was lost.

I just turned around, and we walked back to Exchange Avenue and started going southwest. I knew that, at some point, Exchange intersected with 77th, and all would be well.

A little sidestreet called Saginaw diagonaled off of Exchange a little ways south, and in the little triangle of land between the two was a blandly nondescript restaurant (like the businesses lining 75th, it was all steel shutters and very little visible glass), out of which an old black man literally stumbled out onto the snow-littered sidewalk. He held a paper bag in his right hand, out of which the neck of a green bottle protruded. Subtle.

So, he was an old drunk. I’m not afraid of old drunks; hell, we have old drunks in the suburbs. They ride bicycles to Walgreens and ramble incoherently, just the same as city drunks. Okay, except I’m afraid of old suburban drunks, too, so this was not good.

He shambled slowly ahead of us, toward 76th Street, and I slowed down a little bit, so we wouldn’t catch up to him very quickly (if at all). I had mixed feelings about this decision, because as much as I wanted to avoid a strange encounter with an old drunk, I thought it best to get to where we’re going as soon as humanly fucking possible, and fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice us trailing him about a quarter of a block away.

At this point, Anne piped up, “See, this place is a lot different from the suburbs.”

“Aw, Jesus,” I thought, but the old drunk still didn’t seem to notice us. And he was slowing down even more. I decided that, fine, if he was either going to not notice or pretend to not notice us, I may as well follow my initial plan of going extremely fast. So, I sped up and wedged my fat ass past him, grabbing Anne’s hand and pulling her as close to me as possible. This was half an attempt to make sure she was safe, half a conscious effort to cop a feel. I succeeded in both respects.

We passed a small apartment on the corner of 76th and Exchange, which, I swear to God, had many, many busted-out windows and a door that was being propped open by what looked like a long abandoned stroller.

As we kept moving past 76th, we passed two enormous but not particularly intimidating black men walking in the opposite direction. Still, I was on my guard. When I was in high school, we had this weird seminar with a retired CPD detective, and one of the nuggets of advice he gave us was to carry a decoy wallet at all times. Fill it with slips of paper to create the impression of bulk, even put in outdated (or outright fake) IDs for an air of realism. If you get mugged, throw it into the street. They want the money; they don’t want you. When they run for the money, you high-tail it in the opposite direction.

A good concept, but when you’re in the middle of the south side of Chicago, and your only access to transportation is a train that won’t be arriving for half an hour, it’s troublesome. Of course, I didn’t think of that beforehand. I did make a decoy wallet from my old, worn-out wallet, and I decided while I was at it to make it into a sort of practical joke, for my own amusement. Instead of money, I put in old Wendy’s coupons, good for a free Biggie Frosty. They were expired, which I thought was hilarious. Not only does the guy get nothing but Frosty coupons — they’re expired. Mugger comedy gold.

At any rate, we passed these guys without incident. Like I said, they didn’t look particularly intimidating, but better safe than sorry. Or better paranoid than oblivious.

Okay, so we passed 76th. The next street would be 77th, and we’d be home free, right?

Wrong. As we approached the next street, I squinted to see the sign. “76th,” it said.

“What the fuck?” Anne asked. She noticed it, too.

“I think we slipped into an infinite loop,” I said. Instead of being irritatingly cheerful and utterly without fear, for the first time Anne seemed sort of pissed and — gasp! — a little afraid. It only lasted a second, and in retrospect I think she was more pissed off about my stupid joke than anything else.

As we got closer, I noted it was 76th Place, which, according to the misleading map, starts east of Exchange. I thought maybe we were on the wrong side of the street, but we couldn’t be. We pressed on.

Seriously, for a neighborhood as desolate (very few cars passed by, and there were almost no pedestrians), they sure had their share of people designed solely to creep the hell out of me. The next guy we passed was walking literally in the middle of the street — possibly to avoid the snow that lay unshoveled on the sidewalk, but it’s not like he was next to the curb or anything — and he started randomly shouted incoherent things.

Another drunk? Maybe. A crazy person? Maybe. Somebody I never, ever wanted to communicate with any way? Yes. Oh, God, yes.

“That’s great,” Anne said. “I always wanted to be a person who just randomly screamed things to nobody.”

“Shhh,” I whisper-shouted. I am a wuss.

We passed the drunk-crazy guy without incident, and as we approached the next street, I noticed the buildings — actual houses, as we were entering a genuine residential area — were creeping closer to Exchange. This pleased me, because the wide gulfs of empty, snow-covered parking lots only added to the horrible feeling of desolation. Which is weird, considering it was creating open spaces.

“Why does the next street start with a ‘B’?” Anne asked. I squinted to see the street sign and wondered the same thing.

“Where the fuck are we?” I asked, and my confidence in my ability to read a map waned slightly.

The street was called Burnham, and it isn’t on any map I own (and I own quite a few, because — I swear to God — I used to really want to be a cartographer and have always had an unhealthy fascination with maps). MapQuest lists a “Burnham” Street way far south, and it’s a north-south road, not east-west. What the fuck, dude?

So, were we lost? I was starting to think we were, and I was about to piss my pants when I saw the next street sign. Seventy-fucking-seventh Street.

“Thank God,” I thought, and as we rounded the corner, I heard what sounded like a loud pop, followed by glass breaking and a woman’s scream.

“Ignore it,” I told myself and started eyeballing the addresses on the houses, which looked surprisingly swanky considering the shit apartments and run-down businesses we had seen previously. They were in the 2700’s and going down, which was a happy sign, although I still swear that they should have been gradually going up. What do I know?

As we reached the right house, we walked up the porch. It was beautiful, all wood and stained a really nice dark burnt-sienna color. I rang the doorbell and looked across the street. An enormous, unbelievably beautiful elementary school loomed over a playground near the street. In the playground, a couple of young boys were playing and squealing with joy.

Yes, that’s right. The mysterious sounds of guns, glass, and women were actually small children scraping on slides and jumping up and down. I will officially call myself “paranoid.”

We were invited into the house by one of the faculty members. I vaguely recognized him, but I didn’t know his name. He introduced himself and showed us in.

The house was, quite honestly, the most beautiful home I’ve ever personally been inside. What the fuck?

The whole neighborhood, as I took a second look, seemed mysteriously quaint. Was Exchange Avenue as disturbing as I thought it was, or had I misjudged because I was terrified? Or is it possible that my dad was right when he said that it seemed to have pockets of good neighborhoods mingled equally with bad? Who knows?

We put our coats down and started to mingle. It turned out to be a small affair; Anne and I were the only students in attendance, and there were five faculty members aside from our professor. One of them was my fiction writing I professor, which was fun. She and my fiction II professor compared notes about my writing, and they were far more complimentary of it than anyone in the film department.

And my professor let slip that she actually submitted both mine and Anne’s work to be reviewed for the department’s annual publication. Granted, that doesn’t mean it will be published, but it’s nice that she liked anything I’ve written enough to send it onward.

I loosened up quite a bit as we all talked about random bullshit and I started to ignore the stigma of the south side. Still, I had an itty-bitty ball of fear in the pit of my stomach, but it was becoming less and less of a big deal as time passed. Every time I said something self-deprecating, Anne threw small chunks of strawberry at me. It’s sort of a good system, because I got so annoyed I stopped pretty quickly.

After a few hours, it started to get dark, and my fear increased again. I was scared enough walking down Exchange in broad, blinding post-snow daylight. I assumed I’d have about five heart-attacks walking back up it in the dark, but I was willing to put on a brave face for my newly beloved. It makes me feel like a big man to walk around bad neighborhoods in the dark. Maybe I would pick a fight with some huge guy just to prove how tough I —

“You’re gonna walk to a train in this neighborhood?” one of the faculty members asked as we were getting ready to leave. “Are you fucking nuts? I’ll drive you downtown.”

Oh, thank the fucking Lord. Anne and I wedged into the woman’s two-seater pick-up, and she drove us back up to the north side. She was babysitting or something, so we were actually on the way.

One of the things I noticed as we approached the thankfully familiar North-Damen-Milwaukee intersection was that the north side is approximately two million watts brighter than 79th Street, which we drove for a long while to the expressway. And it was more heavily populated. I never really relax, and I never stop being cauti — er, paranoid, but I at least felt sorta safe, what with the brightly lit signs and the glass and the distinct lack of steel bars covering doors.

All’s well that ends well, as they say. I’m not dead, and I wasn’t even harassed. Was I unnecessarily paranoid in the face of nonexistent danger? I dunno. The other face of the coin is that I was exactly as cautious as I should be going into an unfamiliar neighborhood in what is generally regarded as an unsafe urban area.

SLIGHT UPDATE: Upon further, obsessive map consultation, I found that the north-south Burnham Avenue does snake its way up and, essentially, ends (or begins, depending on how optimistic you are) by jutting south off of Exchange Avenue, which runs northwest-southeast.

Tags: 77th Street, Anne, Chicago, classic, decoy wallet, drunk-crazy, Fall 2003 semester, fear, Fiction Writing I, Fiction Writing II, flirting, fucking nuts, Metra, mistakes, muggers, mysterious noises, paranoid, perfectly innocent, professor, published, random screaming, seminar, South Side, wuss

Posted by Stan on January 24, 2004 11:59 PM  | Permalink | Classic Issues, Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation | Digg It