Feb 2015 - Hyde Park

Hyde Park

by Eric Beeman

             Story goes he was a University of Chicago professor who lost his mind. The man high-stepping purposefully up Kenwood Avenue holding a shepherd's staff, wearing a tartan-print sash over homespun clothes. He chanted incantations, annunciations, proclamations, and prophecies. Proselytizing gibberish. His stick tapped on the sidewalk, counting off his steps. Day after day marching along in a lunatic's song.

            "What department did he teach?" I asked Faruk, wanting to know specificity, since this was his neighborhood, his school, where he came to study Mideast Studies.

            "Who knows? From the looks of things Anthropology, Paleontology? Maybe History?"

            "Scottish Studies?" I wondered, observing of his MacDougal-ish garb.

            "I don't think there is such a department."

            "It would be sad, if he didn't seem so sure of himself."

            "It's true, he seems to know what he's doing."

            We eyed the old professor, holding our breath in as a personal caution. Could this kind of mental slide happen to anyone? Even if never expressed in an overt and public fashion?

            "He must have a pension from U of C, or some form of retirement income." I posited, envious that the man lived his life unhinged, but also apparently self-sufficient and cared for. "I wonder if he does his shopping that way...yodeling up and down the aisles of the Jewel."

            "From what I hear he doesn't shop, he gets the same take-out order from the same Chinese place every day."

            "Hah, like you and your General Tso's chicken on Fridays."

            "Exactly like that, asshole." Faruk elbowed me in the ribs, joshingly. "Do you think that will happen to me, if I don't graduate? Walking off the blocks of Hyde Park uttering fragments of the Arabic words I failed to learn in school."

            "Nah, you got this degree, easy."

            "I was supposed to be done last year."

            "Yah but then you'd be gone, and we'd be over."

            "What is it that you think we are?"

* * *

            Twenty-nine is the last age you can be drunk, hopelessly romantic, and people think its cute, or tolerate it in any kind of way.

            Before text messages and cellphones, there were voicemail messages...waiting for the phone to ring four to six times before a recording picked up the call. I always said something stupid. So to avoid that, I chose instead to drop folded notes through Faruk's apartment building mail-slot in the middle of the night. After riding down the Lake Michigan bike path, post-exit the all-night-bars of Boystown.

            A series of love doctrines, drafted at bar tables while most of the men caterwauled and danced with the beat of bad music, or smoked cigarettes and spilled drinks, leaning flirtatiously out the open windows of cafes with a beer in the hand.

            I was preoccupied, he wasn't. That's what we were. To anyone's eyes, an unlikely couple. He was the impeccably educated, super handsome, well-built son of an Arab Christian businessman and an Irish Nurse. They fled East Jerusalem during in the 1967 war.

            Me, I was a the thin ever-cycling arts-geek son of a fallen-apart Massachusetts family, a wealthy mother cut off from her funds, and an upstart computer whiz dad who left town after he became bored with his suburban life.  

            We were a legacy of mismatched amour played out a generation later...Faruk's striving intellect and my frayed artistry. Spun off in a hundred directions like blobs of Silly String sprayed out of can.

            There was a backstory to our pairing that happened in Boston a few years before. For lack of a better term, I was the other woman to his happy household. Which had been a typical mid-1990's gay partnering. Because living with a man back then was still something of a political statement, it was imperative to look happy, and to be as typically functioning as any straight couple appears to be.  Nine to five jobs, retirement accounts, Friday night cocktail parties with other couples. Boring.

            I can forgive myself, somewhat. Because you can't be the other woman if you don't know the man you are having an affair with was quasi-married.  He kept that from me. Faruk and I had both been lied to by our common love interest. Betrayed and made a fool of, we both fled, and somehow ended up here. Him for school, me to get away.

            Faruk hated me, when we met at the house party of a common friend. He said so. But was just curious enough to want to get to know me.

            Meanwhile, I had a love story playing in my head. That the cheating asshole in Boston represented a mutual wrong turn on the way to what was actually meant to be. He was the car wreck that brought us together.

            Though in truth, it was simply lust in the back of a taxi cab on Cinco de Mayo. Accidental intercourse fueled by Margarita's, Faruk's final exam fatigue, and a night dancing at Berlin, a gender-bent semi-Goth/semi-gay dance club located next to the Belmont El tracks. The plan was to share a cab. But then, curiosity surging, Faruk kissed me in the backseat (I never would have made the first move, he was far too good-looking for me to even try). Our infidel make-out session pissed-off the Pakistani cabbie, who asked us both to get out of his taxi at my house, instead  Faruk staying in the taxi the rest of the way home which had been the plan. We slept together in Lincoln Park where I had rented a mattress-sized spare room in the oversized apartment of my brother who had moved out to Chicago the year before me.

            After our first few weeks of revenge sex, I intonated to Faruk that perhaps the whole bad scene back in Boston must have happened so he and I could be together. His response was swift, "You and I are not forever."  He wasn't about to hitch his wagon to my mess.  I didn't fit the profile of the Gay Doctor Husband or the South End Condo.  That was my ego's interpretation. In truth he was hurt, crushed by the disappointment that Boston didn't work out for him. And no matter how it happened, I was a part of why it hadn't.

            Thus began a decade of interpersonal decadence and inter-relational dysfunction. A prophylactic that prevented a serious relationship involving anyone else. The whole time I was up and down like waves on a tidal chart. Sometimes announcing that I am done with this, but then coming back for more. All the while he was a flat line across the chart.  Where the lines cross, we were together. He never got mad, never got excited, but was happy to open his door to me.

             

 * * *

            Eight months into whatever it was that we had, we journeyed together into the zero degree sunlight of a January morning in Chicago. Eight AM.  The air was bright white and dry. The sound of the snow so cold it tinkled like broken glass as our boots kicked it away, sending tiny rainbows of light onto the sidewalk.  

            He kissed me on the cheek, and gave me a hug the way men do, right shoulder to right shoulder, but bodies otherwise disconnected. "I love the coat," he said. "Perfect for this weather, shukran." He had begun the habit of using short Arabic phrases on me as he entered his final semester of Grad school. Thank you, you're welcome, congratulations....mabrouk.

            For Christmas I had given him a heavy, full-length duffle coat imported from England, the kind with the buttons cut like whales teeth. The hood, when worn, made him look like a monk, or the Ghost of Christmas Future, his face lost inside a tunnel of dark navy wool. 

            "Al'afwa,"I tried to answer in the language he practiced on me. Noticing how the winter sun elicited amber flecks in the retinas of his eyes.

             What Faruk didn't know was I had bought myself the same coat, in my size of course. On those frigid wind chill days where the cold steals the air from your lungs, I would wear it outside and imagine I was walking with him.  I never wore it when he was around. I still have it hanging in my closet, though really Chicago is the only place it is really needed.

            I watched him head to class at the Oriental Institute, an archaic name for a contemporary program, while I walked perpendicular across the park toward the Garfield Avenue bus.

           

            As disarming as winters in Chicago can be, nothing is more jarring then suddenly seeing a small flock of parrot-green birds in the barren trees. I had heard about them before, but never seen them. Monk parakeets, the offspring of someone's pets that have miraculously wintered over in Hyde Park for the past 40 years. Probably released by a student after they graduated.  Out of their element, unmatched for their environment. Not thriving, but persisting.  Bursting with elongated tropical cheers and screeches, finding some edible seed to eat amid the frozen silver branches of the park. I'd swear that I could see their breath exhale, in the arid vacuum-packed air of winter.

            In warmer months I would ride through the same park at night. A drunk man on a bike, with a love manifesto scribbled in my hand. Sometimes knocking, if it was the weekend. Other times dropping it through the door, if I knew he had class in the morning.

            Looking back, I was an honest-to-god stalker. If he didn't like me half as much as he did (which is still a fraction of my adoration for him) he would have cause to file a restraining order. A stop against the reckless beautiful love that tugged at me day and night.  

            A bird let go in the wrong place. A madman singing a genetically derived song from a place inside no one could see. Refusing to recognize that not forever is always the safest bet.