Out And About

Last night was the first night I went out by myself since the stroke. Sunday my wife dropped me off at the story week events on Lincoln Ave, but all I had to do was cross the street and Patricia McNair drove me home so that doesn’t count. Last night my wife Jackie dropped me off at the Brown Line stop on Belmont and I took the el to see Joyce Carol Oates, who is a funny lady.

It started at six. She read a piece of fiction based on the rape of a friend, adding that the friend was okay with the story. She talked a lot about her process. It gave me hope when she talked about a fragment she kept glancing at over the years eventually becoming a novella, I believe. There was a novel inspired by Jon Benet Ramsey where she changed her into a little ice skater and a novel spurred on by thinking about OJ’s kids. It was reveling how her life and thought pushed her art.

The event was held at the Harold Washington Library. It’s a gorgeous place with a lot of marble and granite and escalators. I’ve developed a phobia for going down on an escalator. It’s not severe. Going up isn’t as bad as going down. The first time I had to go down one was at the Barns and Nobel at Webster Place. I went up to the second floor to get Steven King’s ON WRITING. It’s pretty good. He doesn’t pull any punches.

Anyway, I’m at the top of the escalator looking down, way down. The metal stair teeth are hurtling toward the bottom, grinding whatever it is they grind beneath them. Fresh out of the hospital with my new cane I watch the stairs one after another spinning by. I screwed up my courage and there at the top I fidgeted. I hemmed and hawed. I let an older woman go in front to me. I stuck out my foot, made my timing judgment, and took the plunge. I rode those stairs like an incompetent skier looking for something at the bottom to stop me after the stairs spit me out. I survived. I felt pretty good about myself when I took the escalator down to the auditorium to see Joyce Carol Oates.

One of the thing you might not know about a stroke is it messes with you going to the john. One side of the muscles you use doesn’t work right so you can never quite get it all out. You wind up going to the bathroom a lot. After Joyce, I had to go to the bathroom. It was on the third floor.

Before I go on, I want to tell whose ever asinine idea it was not to put a john on every floor has effectively barred my wife and who knows how many other people with disabilities from using the public library, so I hope you feel real good about your self and someday come to some form of repentance for your narcissistic ways.

So I got to the third floor.

“It right over there next to the elevators.” The third floor is as low as the elevators go. “They’re cleaning them right now. You have to go to the fourth floor. They’re in the same place, right above the other ones.”

Four floors of escalators. On the way down I didn’t have to let anyone go in front of me, but then again, there wasn’t all that many people using the escalators.

Out side it was dark. I made it back to Belmont fine. I walked east on Belmont feeling weak and vulnerable. I got a double-tall latte at the Starbucks on Clark, and then I went and caught the grad reading at the Schoolhouse. They’ve changed it since I used to read poetry there, years ago. Some time back then I might have known Achy Obejas as a fellow poet reading around town, at the Mill, or Weeds, or Estelle’s.

The grad reading started at 9:30, my usual bedtime these days. Chris Deguire drove me home. I hope I spelled his name right.