Drunk on Clark Street, we heard a burst of laughter like a rope ladder dropped from the third floor open window above. Nyiah said, Let's go. I said I was pretty tired.

But I followed her through the unlatched chain-link gate, past the coiled garden hose and the pots of bare soil and up the back stairs, a dozen layers of gray paint cracked and coating the hand rails, the steps, the ceiling. We'd traveled those steps before, the ubiquitous intestinal passages of Chicago apartment buildings, but there was no one above expecting the likes of us to walk through the door.

With nervous smiles we made our way through the scouts, clean-cut boys and girls smoking cigarettes and talking in that familiar metropolitan twang about their sex lives, about their habits, about themselves. Too self-absorbed to mind the strange, straight couple six pints to the wind inserting themselves where they didn't belong.

Everyone's in front, suggested a quartet of girls playing cards in the kitchen, a bright Home Depot display of bland conformity, its granite countertops littered with Miller Lite bottles. We grabbed a pair of props and ventured down the hardwood hallway toward the noise, where a roomful of sirens were immersed in an incomprehensible game of plastic cups and beer.

I'd been there before, in high school, in college, in every swollen, bacchanalian ritual of banal self-congratulation that people have forced on me throughout my life. It didn't matter that I was the only male in the room. I was raised polite, and at midnight this tame gathering was coasting on cheap beer, a boozy breath all the admittance necessary.

What was disappointing? That nobody cared? That they were all nice? That three dozen white dykes didn't root out our ruse? Send us tumbling down the stairs and Leave me battered and bloodied in the alley?

Or was it that three dozen white dykes hadn't invited the likes of us in the first place?

Last July while I was walking my dog I watched a man pull up to the lovely, overgrown berm around the corner in a little white pickup with green serif lettering on its doors. He pulled a mower out of his bed, revved it up to a crabby roar and razed all that was green to a flat, sick, brown, buzz-cut. Pollen and dust clouded the street, insects didn't know what to do. I gave him the finger.

Even that meager stretch of earth endured, though. Nobody came back to butcher the plot the rest of summer. Clusters of verdant greenery bloomed untouched, a few feet from parked cars, in beds of dog shit and decomposing Walgreens bags. A lovely and rare sight in a city that pays little heed to the demands of sunlight and water.

Over winter, I watched the cracked and dried stalks poking through drifts, reminding grouchy commuters steadying themselves with outstretched arms and leather-soled shoes over shiny ripples of ice that the world is not dead, just dead tired.

Spring, pissed and cranky, is slow to rouse around here. It sits bolt upright in March, as if waking from a bad dream, then crashes deeper into folds of cold rain and snowflakes for the next month and a half. We shed layers when we know better, pretend it's warmer than it is, watch for the buds on the trees and the dormant grass to grapple and bury the garbage that's settled between rooty knots over the winter.

The berm around the corner was choked with garbage. I listened to hell in my headphones this weekend as I poked it clean with my King Tongs, sidestepping turds and dragging the detritus of American happiness out from the earth that was slowly claiming it. Joyous logos, garish graphics, foil and polyethylene. Plastic straws. Kill plastic.

I filled the dumpster. It took three hours, gray clouds cracking to sunlight. I couldn't imagine a more enjoyable thing to do with my time, head down, working for no man's land, dog hitched to the fence-post, kids on bikes waiting for my back to turn before they tossed their White Castle goblets to the ground.

Labels: garbage, plastic, sadr city

It's a tough thing to get called out in teeball time and time again for being unable to hit the ball out of the infield. Our team, the Hurons, had the worst record in the league and my being platooned in far right field meant that I was the worst player in the league.

To give myself some credit, my father had bought me a brand-new fielder's glove before my inaugural season, a nice gesture except the fact even Andre the Giant would have a hard time squeezing it shut, so saddle-stiff was its leather. Couple that with my natural propensity to daydream and an acre or two of clovers that desperately needed searching for mutant variations, and my teeball career was not off to a good start.

A month into the season, my batting average stood at a solid .000. The coaches were indifferent and my father was mostly at the golf course, so, idiot that I was, I turned for advice to my mother, a woman who not only threw like a girl, but also sewed like a girl and cooked like a girl and talked like a girl, etc.

Her advice was simple: "Once you make contact with the ball, just put your head down and run as fast as you can."

It made sense, but a cursory reexamination of the text reveals a phrase that was to be my undoing, for on that sultry summer night I did swing as hard as I could, and I did run as fast as I could and I did put my head down. And when I couldn't find first base, I lifted my head and found myself standing midway between first and second, nearly in my clover patch, both teams laughing at me.

Labels: advice, humiliation, self-loathing, sports, teeball

One morning in gym class during 8th grade, at the pinnacle of my social ostracism in life, a time when I couldn't make eye contact with a male classmate without him asking me who my best friend was, our gym teacher made everyone in class in succession stand before the class, bend at the waist, touch their head to a wall and attempt to pick up a small chair.

Everyone had to do this, the boys and the girls, those who could perform the task retiring to a different side of the gym than those who couldn't. Soon a pattern developed: the girls were the lifters and the guys weren't, the point being that girls have a lower center of gravity - oh, and Kourlas, too. Cue laughter.

I have thick legs and calves. God bless the gym teacher for utilizing a public forum to reinforce my dad's rebuke while dressing me in ill-fitting church clothes that I had "hips like a girl."

Labels: body, gym, humiliation, middle school, self-loathing

I remember a story that came out of Afghanistan shortly after the defeat of the Taliban in late 2001. A reporter was stricken by how quickly the Taliban forces folded under Western air power, to which the expert in the field made an assertion that it wasn’t the firepower of US weapons that did it so much as their pinpoint accuracy. What the high-tech air war did was create a psychological advantage, effectively scaring the enemy shitless. Once the enemy believes he has no safe haven, that unknown enemies are observing his every move even in the relative safety of a concrete and steel bunker, he has lost. The mind cracks. The army folds.

I imagine that’s what Rumsfeld meant by shock and awe. Or so we dream. I have my doubts. There were a lot of specialty forces and intelligence agents working on the ground in Afghanistan, a lot of imaginative westerners blending forces with a well-established opposition. Shock and awe always seemed a fantastic construct, an opportunity to assert one’s will around the world without tainting one’s culture.

We wish to fight without risk, to fight disembodied battles through well-planned schematics plotted well in advance and executed by sophisticated technology that minimizes human error. Perception is everything, and those that control the conventional wisdom control the world. And when we dominate like we did in Afghanistan the spectacle is overwhelming.

But every strategy succeeds at the expense of another. The world is not a video game. EA Sports, easy sports, dreams. From the cradle of football, the most American of sports, somewhere along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, certain unwritten beliefs were laid out: work and toil, muscle and bone.

Our service economy forgets. Greenspan sits incredulous testifying before a row of senators. Isn’t this what you want? This wealth? This is why I am here. Why else was I born?

So we move to Florida, drain the swamps and send the gators scurrying to the safety of nuclear cooling pools. Our football flips finesse. Go over the top. Five wideouts, an empty backfield. Good protection. Nickel defense. Dime defense. Blitz the corner and drop a linebacker into coverage.

The NFL lost me years ago, back when free agency meant the heroes were nomadic, no longer familiar armies of well-embedded foot soldiers but well-paid mercenaries. Marketing transformed the game from homegrown to processed. The worker became the product.

Yet I could still find beauty in college football. Local traditions evolved over generations. Kids grew into men over a few short years. Not every player made it to the pros, in fact very few, and on any given Saturday you could find one unknown kid assert himself with a surprising play or game. The league, made up of 119 teams, was grotesquely ordered, more concerned with preserving a stable relationship with the past than an easily digestible bite of present entertainment. Championships were decided as best they could, but disputes were accepted. People moved on. It wasn’t the end of the world.

But it’s over now. Gone is the war in the trenches, the blunt clash of 2nd-generation warfare. Football has caught up to 1939: speed thrills, speed kills. And our defense industry continues to fight World War II. We’re trapped in it. We saw a defense industry blossom, a homeland population largely unthreatened, a weakened enemy that couldn’t possibly win a technological race. Our crowning achievement was the Bomb, that lovely demolition of the game itself. Shock and awe, shock and awe.

In the Arizona desert I watched a team, as physically prepared as any, unprepared to match nuke for nuke. They hadn’t played in a month and a half. Medals of honor had been bestowed, but there was one final clash, and as it turned out those who deliver shock and awe are particularly vulnerable to it.

These kids. How on earth, in this tangle of media messaging, while the hands of commerce grasp greed and jerk them about, can they possibly concentrate? A tempest of distractions. What gives a man who puts on a suit and makeup and sits in a studio the right to proclaim how things should be? Who is it that’s selling the false goods? What lasts? A trophy? A spread in a magazine? Where does the Mission Accomplished banner reside now, gathering dust in the possession of some hapless dreamer?

Labels: afghanistan, football, iraq, shock and awe, war

This past New Year's Eve fell on a Sunday, and like any Sunday at our nondescript corner tavern the first round was free. The bartender, a thin woman in her forties dressed up like an Urban Outfitters sales girl, gave us our whiskeys with a shrug. I had called the unlisted number earlier in the evening, asking if anything special was going on that night—a hefty cover, a private party, a dress code—and was served a blunt reply. “Nothing special,” she said. Thank God.

The fluorescent-lit pool table was tucked under its vinyl tarp, balls replaced by plastic trays layered with cheese and crackers and sliced summer sausage all stabbed with little plastic swords like battlefield corpses. A dozen men with various degrees of potbellies and moustaches were watching the Bears flush away their competitive spirits in a meaningless game against the Packers, but for the most part the linoleum floor was empty and the air surprisingly clear. We were beginning to think New Year’s would pass completely unnoticed.

As soon as the game ended, however, bills were slipped in the jukebox and a buoyant young woman began disseminating plastic hats and noisemakers from a cardboard box. We took our props like union extras and watched in glee as the girl tried placing a tiara on one of the regulars playing video slots at the back of the bar, just past the pool table’s white dissecting light. The woman swatted the girl away like an old lioness and told her in not so many words to leave her alone.

Smoke hovered over the cocktail shrimp drenched in catsup sauce, twenty year-old hour d’oeuvres to match the wood-paneled walls and Fleetwood Mac coming out of the speakers. By midnight the room had filled out a bit more, friends and strangers hugging half-heartedly with the congratulatory recognition that they’d fulfilled their corny sacrifice to the calendar god again for a year. We were drunk, but no more drunk than usual. Still, it wasn’t just another night at the bar; we all had Monday off.

And I know on other streets the clubs were filled with actors in TV commercials: girls in glitter-blouses and boys in untucked shirts, Red Bull flowing faster than tonic. They’re angry, shouting at each other because the music is so loud. They mimic fun because they can’t remember how to have it anymore. The heat is unbearable.

But it’s cool in the hipster havens, where bad art hangs on the walls, action figures for nostalgia. Suburbanites slum together, white kids recreating the lunchroom cliques and categories they once upon a time fled. Their hearts beat slow, bored by the house of mirrors they’ve constructed for one another, but they’re flush with cash. They pawned the great egalitarian gift of the city a long time ago.

Labels: bars, chicago, new year's

Watch the positions a child wriggles into to protest the dead minutes after dinner, when the adults are sipping bitter cups of coffee and twirling their wine stems on the tablecloth and talking endlessly about the things adults talk about. The cake is in the kitchen. It's been in there all day, perfect and composed in the hour of its execution, waiting to be cracked and wrecked like a piggy bank. And the adults talk on and on as their food settles. What are they talking about? Don't they know there is cake?

I take my meals over sinks, out of refrigerators, at my desk. People stop in my doorway and I answer their questions with bun spackle in my molars, mustard in the corner of my mouth. I've spent my life stealing away in dogged pursuit of quick, chip-dip-based meals: a knife and a hunk of cheese, summer sausage, a baseball game on the TV. It's too expensive to cook for one, too depressing, too. 

One day a dozen years ago my brother and I took my Yiayia to a chain restaurant called Bill Knapp's. She ordered potato soup, and when the waiter returned to our table to check on us, she asked him in her thick Greek accent if he would tell the chef that he's using too much starch in the soup. "Well, actually," replied the waiter, "there is no chef. All the food, like, comes in bags. From a factory." 

My Yiayia was no dullard; she snorted a good-natured laugh, both at the absurdity of the situation as well as her own naiveté. She spent her life cooking at home and in restaurants, great rich ancient dishes made from scratch. But she also liked pizza and beer and hamburgers. She told us nostalgic stories about growing up in the hills of Sparta, but she loved America and all of its first-world innovations. The generational seams are paved smooth with heavy creams and sauces.

The Jetsons ate pills for dinner but the family still ate together. It was fiction. The real future of food is shot up into space: gelatinous sauces rolled in plastic tubing, energy bars. Solitary foods. Manufactured sustenance is buried beneath shiny packaging in the supermarket aisles. A meal is a pint of ice cream, a frozen pizza, more cardboard than calories. 

The condos on my street pop up like cardboard constructions in children’s books. Their front windows run the length of their living quarters, showing off the way we live: overstuffed couches and plasma television presided over by a great big marble kitchen. But there's no dining room, no table, no space to insulate oneself from the advertisements on television.

If I weren’t a coward I’d buy a dining room table and make friends over slow meals lubricated with alcohol. We would sit around the table for hours while we told stories and submit complaints. We would celebrate Thanksgiving in February, September, June. Everyone would bring a side dish and we’d all compliment each other and leave with reluctance. But we wouldn’t overeat, we wouldn’t feel greedy, because there would be no question that we’d soon come together to celebrate another Thanksgiving together.

Labels: family, food, friends, greek, meals, yiayia