We go to the ticket counter and are given hotel rooms and food vouchers for McDonalds in the food court and us identity-free men are sent out into the night with an address to a hotel printed on paper, while the women and people of color and Amish are escorted by a station attendant. One Junior G Kang, who pretended not to hear the 20 announcements to offload to catch a bus and make his train 2 towns back, tried too plead with the matriarchal Quean behind the counter that, “I am new and confused to this Amtrak experience!” She rolled her eyes and sneered, gave him a voucher and, like us ghosts, consigned him to wander in the night in this strange city without directions.
“I’m trying to get a hotel room,” he confided to me, apparently wanting to delay his arrival in the Detroit ghetto. “You getting that hotel room, sir?”
He tried to enlist me as a team member for mutual protection. But this guy deserves to be poached by his Chicongo cousins and I was sure he would try and glom onto me for purchasing power at the hotel. So I shrugged him off and walked the other way, and returned inside to ask for directions.
The young white attendant, very helpful to Kangs and Queans and females, sneers at me, “You walk south on [Sarotoga, I think [1]] two blocks and make a right.”
“It’s night sir, I cannot see the sun and don’t know where south is.”
“Make a right,” he says with extreme contempt.
There seems nothing in the world that a 30-year-old middle class white man hates more than older white trash.
Leaving by the exit he points to, opposite of the one the black lady behind the counter told me to take, I note for the second time, that these towering glass buildings have zero visible signage. Only Amtrak and Union Station are signed. The other buildings, high rise glass towers, loom anonymously overhead in the rainy night.
I decide to do my normal grid walk of feature mapping. My patched right eye and half blind left eye, heavy rucksack and overall looks declares to one and all that I am lost. I walk the grid and start to cross the river and a muscular kang of perhaps 40 glides up next to me and asks me if I smoke and suggests I come with him around the corner and I say, “No,” and put hand to knife. He glares angrily and runs ahead and across the street.
Imagining Zulu spears being sharpened in some nearby kraal, I retreat to the station again by the first exit, starting to map the dark area in my addled mind. I find the McDonalds and they don’t take cash and orders are done by kiosk. I am hungry now after 30 hours of fast, but the smell of some unioil mist in the eatery repels me and I go down and ask security thugs, and the black lady behind the desk for directions, and they all four flatly refuse, the cops laughing at me.
I just want a simple “take a left, 1 block, left two blocks, right one block,” something these people that work in the area should be able to provide.
I head back out a third exit and am right across from an Amtrak building that towers, though I just left an Amtrak Buildings and stand between its great white pillars. Might that be the hotel? There is a hotel inside of the Denver station.
There is a helpful kang in yellow safety gear and hat selecting cabs for upscale white folks. He asks me if I need help, with a tone that says it will cost, with all the sense of the urban grifter finding a chance blown hayseed in his power. He was a big strong man of forty, with big hands. I handed him the voucher and asked him which one of the hotels listed there was in the area, as neither was circled. He did not know for free. So I said, “I’ll take that back.”
He gave it and said, “You in Chicago, sir. I wouldn’t suggest the street.”
“I’ll go back inside until they kick me out.”
“That they will, sir, that they will—you can count on that!”
I went back to an empty ticket counter and asked the lady there for the third time, if she could indicate which of the two Hiltons on the letterhead was in the area, so I could look for it. She pointed disdainfully at the one on the left, declining to waste ink marking it. I went looking, out into the night.
I found myself tiring and used the elevator. A giant homeless kang pushed in at street level, dragging a cart full of possessions and I slid by him as he mumbled to himself, old and confused like me.
Chicago by night, a place I have never set foot in outside of the train station by day, was like Manhattan without the trash and the army of blew-suited pigs. Rich whites, drunk and high, trundled along in packs, this being about 9:00 at night. I walked the grid, circling, avoiding two single kangs who were following me. Crossing the river again, I found more unmarked babble buildings, anonymous towers of glass soaring into the misty night.
Some rich gay men veered away from me like I had the plague.
I stopped and saw a young, spry, kang bounding towards me from behind across the head-light streaked street, and put hand to knife and snarled. He bounded back whence he had come.
At this point I realized that though the cops and the Amtrak folk were usually kind to me due to the Teamster clothes, that the look of a retired man burdened by a heavy pack, made the hyena men of Kangdom thirst for the contents of what was surely valuable in that pack, that could be used to throw me down if they got behind me.
I walked on, right hand on knife, left hand pulling my assist chord, kind of stalking. Came two more rich white thirty-something men in suits, giggling like girls, going quiet and staring at me wide-eyed like I was an extinct animal suddenly risen before their eyes.
Then I saw him, an Eastern European man, barrel chested under a fitted suit, smoking a cig, by himself down a dark alley under an anonymous tower of glass. Where to the whites I am a gutter thing and to the kangs I am an opportunity to loot an old overburdened runt, lost in the night, this man seemed different.
I stepped to within three paces of him, stopped, took hand from knife and held my pull straps and asked, “Sir, is the Hilton hotel nearby?”
He dropped his smoke, stepped on it, looking like Igor Vovychin, and nodded to the building the base of which nearly touched his broad shoulder and said, “This is it.”
I walked twenty feet and saw a small red sign in cursive light inset at about ten feet high and invisible from anywhere but on the sidewalk at the foot of the tower of glass.
I stepped inside and a kind African man manned the counter, took my voucher, and gave my the room card for 716. I asked him if there was a place to eat and he said, “A bar around the corner past the elevator.”
The security guard was a small, slow-witted rural man with white uniform and gun who eyed me suspiciously. I found the elevators as my calm nerves started to fray and I shook like a leaf. Five elevators of stainless steel. The first, being the sixth by number, went to the roof.
The three to the right would not open for me or other serfs. I was told by the security guard that these were for the rich people, that I needed to use one of the first two. In I went and pressed the 7th floor button. Nothing. Nothing. I exit 1, thinking it broken and enter 2, and nothing, no lift. This thing would not go. The security guard was looking at me like he had finally found a white man more out of place in Five-Star Chicongo Tower than him.
A tall, good looking girl, about 35, a five foot eight inch brunette with a 7 face and an 8 pseudo-athletic body stepped in, smiled and soothed, “I know this is confusing sir. You place your card on this panel down here and it lets you operate the elevator.”
I thanked her, she went to floor five, and smiled down over her shoulder, “Have a nice night, sir,” and walked out into the bright hallway.
I ran into a lone young man who had been on the train who tried to befriend me as a fellow white and I blew him off, a demonstration of my bad character and low trust on my small sour part.
I reached the room and was delivered into a remote paradise—the nicest place to sleep I had ever encountered: Kurig cups and machine on the counter, the best shampoos and lotions to shove into my side pouch, a bed that could have slept an extended family. I backed up onto the luggage bench and sat, unhooking my rucksack and turning, intent on a bath and hitting the sack—then I saw the giant TV screen, in weird mazing blue light, proclaiming, “Welcome, James.”
I hate Chicago! I hate this world! It hates me and knows where I am—knows my name!
I needed a drink—well a few, to calm my nerves and get me to sleep so I do not miss the 7:20 train. I had asked the African to give me a wake-up call at 5 A.M.
Downstairs to the bar, for a beer or few I went.
…
Notes
-1. With true American lack of imagination and addiction to mythos, the street names in the area include Franklin and Adams as well.
