I was embarrassed when my father and uncle saw my first apartment in Chicago. I took the Orange Line to Midway Airport and we drove a rented car back to Rogers Park. I tried to distract them as we walked up the stairs, but the brown stain on the second floor landing, still read “D I E,” which was freshly written when I first looked at the studio six months earlier, the landlord promising that it would be washed and painted. He did, but the blood became the color of a rotted pumpkin.
The apartment’s view was bi-polar; on one side a chain-linked fence separated us from stacks and stacks of rubber tires – the apartment smelled like an auto repair shop. On the other side of the room, the windows faced a courtyard, with another building facing us. That view was pleasant because of the green grass and rustic building backdrop, which reminded me of Jimmy Stewart’s view from Rear Window. The courtyard view was the deciding factor for my renting the place. I liked the idea of living there. Its dingy, cigarette-stained ceilings with hoary trimming housed so many people. It was one of those claustrophobic studios found in old metropolises whose only constant change was not the interior, less the layers upon layers of paint applied after each tenant vacated, so much paint that it rounded the sharp edges of the coffered ceiling with dry globs for the past 85 years. No, it was outside the room that constantly changed, it was the view from the window that altered from year to year; from Model T Fords to hippies to the subsonic rumble of hip-hop music from a passing car. Signing the lease I realized that pealing off that paint was like the pealing off the bark on a tree and examining its history through its growth rings and I recalled how Dostoevsky never rented a garret without a view of an Orthodox church.
My childhood home in Colorado was built in the mid 1960s as part of a development community where all the houses sat in line – my bedroom view was of the next house which was identical symmetrically to ours. It was easy to imagine city life when I looked out that window towards the twin offspring of my house, gazing as if another boy in the same window across the narrow strip of grass was looking back at me. I moved to Chicago to change that view into what I saw in films: wet city streets lit with a row of lights, tall, vintage buildings looming against the stars, a trail smoke plumming into the dark sky from some anonymous chimney. I also left home to be with Venetta, who was born and raised in Chicago’s North Side. We fell hard for each other, and when I moved to Rogers Park my expectations clashed with a quick and volatile force that only love can justify.
After I moved into Rogers Park I adopted a dog, Vito, thinking the courtyard was room enough for him to play and run around. As with all puppies, I was up and down three flights of steps, nine, ten times a day, and on closer inspection the courtyard was covered in cigarette butts, beer bottles, and once in a while, a condom. The tenants looked haggard, always carrying something – a grocery bag, a laundry sack, dragging their children along. Climbing down the stairs one night Vito started howling as I almost ran over a man and a woman smoking crack outside the door of the second floor apartment, rented by an elderly woman. The man was her son, and he (typically accompanied by a woman) often passed-out outside her door. I always thought he smeared the bloody word on the wall.
After six months I moved out. It took three trips down the stairs to empty my apartment. I scribbled a note for Venetta, and while I adjusted my things in the car I had the strangest feeling she would drive by, pleading for me no to leave. She’d pull over and run towards me, her long obsidian hair twirling in the wind except for one strand glued to her cheek from the tears and reconcile. I settled my things and waited a while, then got into the rented car, returned some rented movies to the store, and drove home to Denver.
A year and a half later that reconcile occurred and I found myself in Chicago again. I moved in an apartment near Diversy and Sheffield, renting it while still in Denver, without even seeing it, my only concern being its location in relation to my new university. It was larger than the Rogers Park apartment and Venetta and I felt somewhat at home. Many summer nights we sat at our bay window over looking the street, which was lit under an antique yellow hue and watched fresh, beautiful tenants congregate and cocktail-it to the morning hours. No one looked haggard or tired, no one seemed defeated; it was as if they drank from a secret and indomitable spring that I did not or could not know about. Their yards were carefully manicured with flowers and stone fountains, the ripple of water audible from our window, transporting us to an oasis in the middle of a steaming city.
As we sipped iced coffee one summer night, we inhaled our view of the block like kings, debating whether we should take a walk through our charming neighborhood or cab it for a night on the town. We decided to do both and walked a few blocks to the Southport Corridor. We bar hopped for a while and finally decided to go home when suddenly a BMW almost ran us into a building. A young woman in high heels stumbled out of the car, her skirt hiked way too high. She was drunk and slammed the door then kicked the side of the car. The driver stepped out and punched her in the face. She fell on her back and the man drove away. That night, in bed, I kept hearing the sound of his fist on her face. It was a dry smack - an unnatural contact of flesh and bone against flesh and bone.
After that, the neighborhood lost its charm. It made me sad. My gaze, the distance from the window to the street, was far enough to create a deceptive view. But up close, the people were often drunk, their bottles discarded in flower beds, and more than once I had to yank Vito away from someone’s soiled undergarment in the gutter. I tried to rationalize that these tenants were first time renters fresh out college, still in the dorm frame of mind. But that reasoning was lost when I had to maneuver up three flights of stairs passed someone’s final drunken statement all over the steps, the kind that you can smell exactly what they ate and drank. Again Venetta and I grew apart as I held myself hostage in the apartment refusing to leave, smoking and watching as the Lincoln Park bars emptied into the streets, the stragglers stumbling home and screaming guttural noises that I could never make out, watching them all and blowing smoke out the window.
I had finished school and Venetta was doing well at work, so we bought a condo, a little further north, in Buena Park. It was a rehabbed vintage building that included a parking space, so we took the plunge. There was plenty of room inside for Vito to run around and we even got him a little sister, Lucy. The building was built in 1909 and stood on a narrowly curved street where two White Oaks blocked our view from the third floor, whose branches barely scraped the window when the air stirred, tapping on the pane like an unexpected guest who’s dropping by for coffee. I liked those trees, even in the winter as they pathetically refused to bow down to the winds, leafless and bare.
Venetta seemed to like them more than me. They commanded the view, entirely shrouding our gaze to the street. We didn’t see people walking or cars rushing by. We saw the bark of the trees turn soft from the evening air and I would hear the branches sway in the breeze. I would see a hermit thrush, perched and swollen, burst into song between its foraging. Those trees anchored us to Chicago. We’d lie down on our couch and look through the window at its branches, its leaves, the birds and squirrels and talk about our life, past, present, and future with a sense of irrevocable hope.
One day as we returned from work, sunlight blared through the windows. The trees were gone, cut down by the condo management association. For the next two weeks I saw a sadness in Venetta that was there when we first broke up. In bed we could hear people arguing and tires screeching, sounds that must have been there before but never heard. And now, as we decided about what kind of blinds to get for the windows, I hold Venetta tightly, wanting desperately to whisper in her ear, to promise her that I will plant a tree so we can watch it grow, and create another view from within.
