Chapter 24
We arrived in Chicago about 11:30 p.m. I checked my log notes with the gas mileage and odometer readings as we searched for another gas station. We turned a clean 74,000 miles just as we rolled up to the pump; seven, four, zero, zero, zero. Spin, Cherries, Cherries, Orange, Nothing. Good-bye. Isn’t it crazy how everything in life is about numbers and formulas? They’re the only things that make absolute sense in the world. Luke shelled out $12.92 at the island window for 12.1 gallons of gas ($1.06 per gallon). The tank was full again.
And the oil diggers hummed everywhere to satisfy the world’s all-consuming petro thirst. They dipped indifferently out in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula; they sank deep into the turquoise oceans off the coast of Venezuela; they were everywhere; they were in the North Sea of Scotland, even in Texas and Alaska. I wondered if the lone digger in the backyard lot on Sixth Street in Huntington Beach was still sitting silent. In my mind she was.
When I was fifteen years old, I siphoned gas up on the hill on Eighteenth Street into a five-gallon plastic container. In the middle of those 1973 October nights, Ray Champeaux and I would go from car to car outside the apartments at the edge of the dark Eighteenth Street woods. Gas prices had gone from $.36 per gallon to $.40 per gallon that year, and we needed to get gas for our nightly joy rides. While parents sat in front of their TV sets watching Archie Bunker and McCloud Texas Ranger, I was shoving a rubber hose down into some poor soul’s gas tank. I remember I got a mouthful of gasoline once and had to spit it out quickly. My friend Ray boasted that it tasted like a shot of whiskey, ’cause he had downed his father’s whiskey before, and it was horrible like that. Karma would come back to get me someday for stealing people’s gas; Luke had told me so. I was the sparrow being chased by the jay hawk on the open Oklahoma plain, flying erratically trying to avoid repentance, but the hawk, so big and overpowering, was dangerously closing in on me. The hilly woods of Eighteenth Street rose up above a field of marshlands and the frozen stick tunnel of my childhood. This was the infamous stick tunnel that we had to all crawl through in my juvenile skating days, the tunnel of sticks that led to the timeless Paul’s Pond. In the short days of winter, we would crawl through with our skates on our back, our hockey sticks too, in order to get to the endless fields of ice, frozen paths between the rows of marsh weeds, a labyrinth of sorts that would all ultimately lead to the beautiful pond. But that’s a whole different story.
I watched those numbers spin on the pump in Chicago, like it was some sort of jackpot in some wild dream. These were the seconds and minutes of life, the passing of time, numbers spinning away as they added up faster than the second hand spins on the grandfather clock. Life was fleeting, where a written sentence was only good before the period. The power of choice was in the present moment for sure.
I thought about America’s dwindling energy woes as those numbers turned on the one-armed gas bandit.
The party is over, the wine has been drunk, more barrels of oil on back order
Seven veiled sisters hold out their hands at the front of a line
Worth more to the desert than water
And the days are getting shorter
Decky’s friends Colin and Xander lived in an apartment in the city. This was what I envisioned Chicago to be. It was an old brown stone building just like the buildings in Boston . . . These faces of stone that lined the streets breathed centuries of past tenants’ souls, tenants who had come and gone, spirits living within the same walls of these hundreds-year-old structures forever, lives that had walked these city streets, over and over again. This was the Windy City, the beautiful Midwest city on the lake, the home of old-time gangsters like Al Capone and the likes of bootleggers who once defined all of prohibition itself. It had everything you looked for in a big city. This was the home of the Chicago Cubs and of Wrigley Field. I sat for a few moments in the brown stone courtyard amidst walls of crawling ivy taking notes.
Decky knew Colin and Xander from Ohio State. Colin worked for AT&T and had been in Chicago for about a month now; he left Ohio after his longtime girlfriend had dumped him. He told us that he needed to move away from everything that reminded him of her. Xander was an accountant for Peat, Marwick, and Mitchell. He had been working for them in Chicago for two months now, but like all of the other friends we had encountered, secretly wished he could come with us on our adventure. The stress of this postcollege job in a new city was driving him mad. He was losing his hair and his mind.
We sat in the rented $800 per month apartment living room with its Victorian high ceilings, cracked plaster walls, and old hardwood floors, drinking beers and screwdrivers, listening to Al Jarreau on Xander’s new high-fidelity stereo system. The stylus rolled against the pressed vinyl tracks of the record. We sat through the cracks, pops, and idiosyncrasies of it all. The stylus sifted through every audible scratch, mere bumps and potholes that strangely enhanced the good sounds of life, this beautiful medium called music. It was the sweet sound of substance. I felt the richness within me, the instrumentals and vocals emanated from the two floor speakers on opposite sides of the room. They rolled and collided with each other and then came at us and hit us where we sat on the couch—it was incredible. We might as well be right there in the studio with Al Jarreau himself as he recorded this crazy track, for that’s how real it all seemed.
“We are the hippies of the modern era, the beat generation of the ’80s!” Luke proclaimed with certain happiness. He toasted Colin and Xander. It was happiness and a sense of freedom that no workingman could ever know.