If “homesick” is a virus, I had walking pneumonia and the only Kleenex in the galaxy happened to be located in the outside pocket of a suitcase that evaporated into thin air.  We’d planned this trip to Chicago for months and months.  That which began as the Christmas stocking of a very special getaway ended as a fairly sound upgrade of Dante’s Inferno.  It all started with the dog taking a dump in our luggage and our plane leaving three hours late.  Things went downhill from there.

The reason raisin for this trip was, I’ll admit, plumped in self-deception.   After a string of surgeries, we thought anything was better than camping out in the parking-lot of Rogue Valley Medical Center, even though we did earn a private slot, rather like frequent-flyer mileage on a sinking ship.  I had a somewhat naive picture of urban life in the confines of my innocent country mind and just assumed that with a population sporting so many zeros, we’d run across a decent person, but there is something about that place that kills the virus of humanity.  Having a number of metal joints gracing my disasters in the body department, I go off like a firecracker on the 4th when they run me through security.  While I calmly assured them that I didn’t have “a banana in my pocket,” this accomplished nothing but a 911 call to the border patrol and a string of reinforcements from the FBI.  They patted me down so many times I started to feel like the only girl in a boy’s locker room full of twelve-year-old genitals.

When we finally landed at O’Hare, I was dying of thirst and every pizza stall we passed was smothered in sweat and anchovies.  Refreshments were reserved for the elderly and those who fell off the moving sidewalk to Timbuktu.  I can be the “Rock of Ages” when it comes to density, but I began to see the raison d’être of serving beer on every street-corner.  Reality is a car-crash you do your best to delete. 

I was glad I brought all my credit cards.  It took a Visa to shut the bathroom door and a Mastercard to jump-start the drinking fountain, the contents of which tasted like pickle water that’s been in the fridge for a good five years.  We were dying for a smoke and some laughter, but the only people who giggle in that urban sewer are the cab drivers who have laid out a handful of unsuspecting pedestrians on route to the petting zoo.  Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I was convinced that the farther away from home I got, the better it looked. 

 Losing luggage is not normally a national disaster, but I think they were filming footage for the re-run of  The Conspiracy Theory; like the protagonists in the story, we were at the mercy of uncompromising bureaucrats.  The luggage carousel was padded, as fortune would have it, because passengers have to wait so long to pick up a toothbrush that they’re ready for the funny farm.  My first instinct was to scream “FIRE!” in an effort to whittle down the line to the complaint department, but that strategy was already a cliché, since they stole the book of matches in my back pocket when they were running me through security. 

 Getting a taxi was like getting in the back door of the White House, except there all you have to do is substitute politically correct for a somewhat obvious insight. It takes a senator to unlock the front gate, a representative to turn a doorknob, and Socks is the only one who gets to use the John (he won a popularity pole, so he’s got unalienable rights to the place).  Since I am a gold-card member of the disabled community, I was suffering under the respectable illusion that someone might be polite, but since the wheelchairs were spending all nine of their lives as luggage carts, we had to hop up four flights of stairs to find an exit sign. 

 In Chicago, they have maps of buildings everywhere.  Every road-trip to the toilet is marked with “ACCESSIBLE.”  I guess it all depends on your frame of reference, but I think as truths go, this was a little white lie every which way but black.  You have to get voted into the Hall of Fame to get a stall; even then, you’re on your own when it comes to muggers.  I was a little peeved when we had to swim the English Channel in the traffic arena to make it to the freeway, but having no luggage aboard, I’ll admit we did make pretty good time.  We spent the first half of the trip in the check-in line of the hotel.  I’ve always wondered how The Great Lakes were born: it has to do with simple bladder overload years before that little miracle of an outhouse was invented.  I brought my goggles.

I’ve always been afraid of poorly lit parking lots, but in Chicago this isn’t much of a threat, since it takes four tanks of gas and a Ph.D. in “screw you” to garner a space to put your car in; then they charge you for the opportunity to break into it and steal your stereo. We actually witnessed a bank robbery and a car-fire (ostensibly conducted by a White Supremacist group).  Lucky devils.  They must have gotten out of the airport with their cigarette lighters.  The fragrance of apathy in urban life smells much the same as dead fish; the distinction is that those stinkers don’t have to pay a $5 toll to make it to a trash can. 

Our hotel was the Ramada Inn (subtitled: “We aim to please, but we’ll shoot you if you ask for anything in the category of service”).  They put us in a room the size of a laundry chute and gave us a discount to be
collected in the form of stuffed shirts.   The city was unrivaled in this department.  The clerk at the desk assured us that we had an “ACCESSIBLE” room, but only a cockroach could squeeze comfortably between the door and toilet and they’d pretty much snatched all the real estate in the area, so I didn’t push the issue.  I wasn’t all that handicapped when I arrived, but give me three more days in that place, and I’d have been on the cover of Miracle Magazine: the shower head dripped slower than a Sunday sermon, so I had to invent twelve new yoga positions in a desperate attempt to wash the soap out of my hair. 

Thursday morning, I decided to clear my head by swimming a few laps in the outdoor pool.  The tiny gate had a lock on it with a sign that read: “No lifeguard.  Swim at your own risk.”  I wasn’t sure if they were referring to the water or the bureaucratic bullshit, so with a little boost from my boyfriend, I proceeded to jump the fence and get on with my life.  At this point, I was surrounded by four body-guards in black ties and woolen suits; they had phones and beepers coming out of every orifice imaginable and threw a fairly respectable hissy fit in the indignant department.  The conversation went thusly:  “You may not, under any conditions, enter this pool area until 10:00 a.m.!  There is no lifeguard.”  “Duh” and a few other improprieties squeezed between the logistical cracks.  I am usually a veritable fountain of understanding, but patience was beginning to wane here and I started scraping at the gate like a Saint Bernard who just inhaled a twelve-pack of  Extra-Strength Ex-Lax.  It was not a pretty sight. 

“Forgive the intrusion,” I said.  “Why does it matter if I jump in the pool ten minutes early?  You swim at your own risk anyhoo?”  “These are the rules!” says the big cheese.  We’re not talkin’ small bricks here.  This guy used up every square of cotton that survived the Civil War in the underwear division alone.  I’d hate to think what he had to pay for a tie.  I’m 5’2”, weighing in at about 95 lbs., soaking wet: there I am, with my hands firmly attached to my irritated hips (it was a five mile walk from the lobby to the pool and their buses weren’t running, as consistency would have it), trying to wedge a smidge of common sense into the dialogue.  We had a formidable stare down for about ninety seconds. 

I stood my ground with a fever that made the Washington Monument look like a Ping-Pong paddle and the battle blossomed to new heights of trivial pursuit.  The head honcho’s argument was that the pool had to be cleaned first. I knew he couldn’t accomplish this in a three-piece suit, and when I imagined that elephant in a pair of swimming trunks, I had to go throw up in the bushes.  Dirt wasn’t an issue here, but there was enough bullshit floating around to fashion a pretty roomy swamp for the administrative alligators that had us by the balls more often than we’d care
to admit.  I asked how one accomplishes such a task with no vacuum in sight, and I got one of those “city” glares that could slice a cheesecake for a decent-sized reception at the White House.  The gentleman on “duty” yanked out his phone, played with the antennae long enough to get a fairly formidable erection, and called for back-ups.  I think they planned my funeral before they ever answered the question.  If you’re gonna cross the borders of politesse in Chicago, bring a sleeping bag and a snack or you’ll croak on death row while you’re waiting in line to pay the fine for your indiscretion.

By the time my sweetie and I boarded the plane for Oregon, I’d sold 3/4 of my Compaq stock to buy people out of their seats so the 747 would fly a little faster.  I was gettin’ home even if I had to land that sucker blindfolded in the middle of our kitchen table.  “Honey,” I said, “The next time we go on vacation, can we just park in the ditch or have a weeding party in the backyard?”  Poor guy, he didn’t even get a good-night smooch: my lips were absolutely fried from kissing all the dirty doorknobs and washing down the walls with effusive praise.  “If you must go this way again...” kept running through head.  The answer was, “Over my dead body; on second thought, make that his.”
 

- Janet I. Buck