Home: Late November, 1994
JP loves the apartment the moment he sees it.
For nearly a month we have slept on the floor of his mother’s apartment, indignant and self-contained. My mother has put me out after another “discussion”, and his mother has taken me in because I seem like a nice girl. We sleep, smoke weed, call in sick to work. We fuck incessantly and fiercely and plan majestic conquests.
But there is no way we are going to conquer anything from JP’s old bedroom, and so we set out to get a place of our own. I am working three jobs in my vain attempt to get out from under David’s wreckage, but somehow once I am out of my mother’s house, the effort no longer seems as important. JP and I are together; that is the only thing that matters.
The rental agent takes us to a long cul-de-sac full of crumbling frame houses and sparkly-new cinderblock yuppie-havens. This is Wicker Park, barely a mile from Six-Corners. The fact that these names are both sloppy geographical abstractions has done nothing to calm the ardor of the nouveau-hipsters, the ones frenzied by talk of a “Chicago Scene” that might one day rival Seattle. We don’t buy into it ourselves, of course, but JP is starting a band, after all, and we concede that it might be wise to stack the odds in our favor.
The house she takes us to is in the middle of the block, with a vacant lot just to the east off the bedroom window. The siding on the house is the sort of patchy tar-and-gravel sheeting that covers my mother’s garage back home, and the picture window is covered with steel mesh, to keep out burglars and bullets.
But inside, the floors are sparkling hardwood, the carpet in the bedroom is new, and the apartment is airy and light. There is a walk-in closet just off the kitchen, and best of all, a little den where JP can play guitar, where I can write poetry. The apartment itself is an old storefront, isolated from the rest of the building; perfect for late nights of loud guitars and wild beatnik brilliance. And at four hundred dollars a month, I can quit two of my jobs and have time to actually be brilliant, instead of just talking about it.
“It’s perfect,” JP says. “Absolutely perfect.”
For nearly a month we have slept on the floor of his mother’s apartment, indignant and self-contained. My mother has put me out after another “discussion”, and his mother has taken me in because I seem like a nice girl. We sleep, smoke weed, call in sick to work. We fuck incessantly and fiercely and plan majestic conquests.
But there is no way we are going to conquer anything from JP’s old bedroom, and so we set out to get a place of our own. I am working three jobs in my vain attempt to get out from under David’s wreckage, but somehow once I am out of my mother’s house, the effort no longer seems as important. JP and I are together; that is the only thing that matters.
The rental agent takes us to a long cul-de-sac full of crumbling frame houses and sparkly-new cinderblock yuppie-havens. This is Wicker Park, barely a mile from Six-Corners. The fact that these names are both sloppy geographical abstractions has done nothing to calm the ardor of the nouveau-hipsters, the ones frenzied by talk of a “Chicago Scene” that might one day rival Seattle. We don’t buy into it ourselves, of course, but JP is starting a band, after all, and we concede that it might be wise to stack the odds in our favor.
The house she takes us to is in the middle of the block, with a vacant lot just to the east off the bedroom window. The siding on the house is the sort of patchy tar-and-gravel sheeting that covers my mother’s garage back home, and the picture window is covered with steel mesh, to keep out burglars and bullets.
But inside, the floors are sparkling hardwood, the carpet in the bedroom is new, and the apartment is airy and light. There is a walk-in closet just off the kitchen, and best of all, a little den where JP can play guitar, where I can write poetry. The apartment itself is an old storefront, isolated from the rest of the building; perfect for late nights of loud guitars and wild beatnik brilliance. And at four hundred dollars a month, I can quit two of my jobs and have time to actually be brilliant, instead of just talking about it.
“It’s perfect,” JP says. “Absolutely perfect.”
posted by GJC at 12:23 AM
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