Mapquest

I was filling out a profile for the Chicago Works website. They want you to give them all information about you that can be verified on paper, from ss# to every apartment you've lived in for the last ten years, and during what times. I wasn't sure how mandatory this information was but I considered it interesting and a bit of a challenge to see on one screen all of the addresses I've had during the last ten years because I've lived here in Chicago for just about that long, and I've moved on average every one and a half years since then. The first two or three were pretty easy, but then I started having a hard time remembering the specific number of the addresses, and after I'd been working on it for about forty five minutes I pulled up mapquest to try and jog my memory by finding the addresses of businesses I remember to have been around there. Eventually it got to the point where I was trying to remember the number of the address when I lived on California street in between Armitage and Milwaukee, and there just wasn't anything right around there, and if you go to mapquest you can switch from a graphic map to a satellite view of the neighborhood, which any of you who have done this recognize as being pretty cool and not a little bit creepy, and I was looking around for my apartment, the apartment I lived in with Sean and Kile until Sean died in a bicycle accident and we had to move out, but I didn't have any where to go because I hadn't contributed to the security deposit and anyway I was pretty fucked up and out of my head by the death of like my best friend ever, he was only 24, a year older than me and five years younger than I am now, so I figured out how to gain access to the rooftop- this was spring, going into summer, and I decided that all I had to do was build a shelter for myself and I would be fine. The day we moved out Kile and I hadn't finished packing up our things because it was the last day of the month and we thought we had one more day but the landlord, who was really cool about the whole thing and let us out of the lease way early, showed up with his handyman and started cleaning and re-painting the whole place while the new tenants, these three college guys, were moving in. I managed to arrange for my friend Matt to come and help me pack the rest of my stuff into his car, where it would stay for months, but I had to wait until he got off of work and so I was sitting in the hallway, surrounded with all of my junk, including what remained of the groceries I wasn't willing to part with, like milk and butter and potato flakes, and I was pretty hungry so I decided to use Sean's fry daddy to cook me up some potatoes. I knocked on the door to my old place and asked the landlord, who was cleaning out the refrigerator, if I could use the outlet just inside the door and he was like "Of course, man, don't worry about it." I had to scrape out some pretty serious congealed grease left over from late drunken nights when Sean would dump an entire bag of Aldi tater tots into that fry daddy and gobble the shit out of them, sharing of course. In case you don't know, by the way, those things are already mostly grease because they are supposed to get nice and crispy without the benefits of a fry daddy. I say this only because whenever I think about that fry daddy I get a pretty clear image of Sean clutching his guts with his fingerless bike gloves, his pimply shaved head going from pink to green, but never once uttering a word of regret, if for no other reason than because there were five more bags of Aldi tater tots in the freezer. Once I got rid of as much goop as I could I dumped in the milk and butter then everything else, but I before I had a chance to eat them Matt showed up and we stuffed my shit into his car and then he took me to Home Depot where I made a copy of the key that I borrowed from the landlord that granted me access to the door on the side of the building the led to the stairs which led to the balcony in the alley where I could climb up these ancient iron rungs built into the brick and open this trap door to what became for the next four months or so my home sweet home, the rooftop. Living up there was a bizarre experience, sometimes nice, like one day when it was really hot and I got home from my new job-training at the phone company and I was eating peanuts and reading Catcher in the Rye, like cracking open the shells with one hand and holding a book with the other, and eventually I noticed a seagull had perched on the ledge next to my head and I was like "Sorry, man" when I realized all I had left were salty shells, and then I looked past my book directly up at the sky and there were hundreds of them circling directly above me, higher than I would have guessed a seagull could circle. I had to lay down mostly while I was up there, especially during the daytime, because I didn't want people to see me from the street or other buildings over the lip that bordered the rooftop, but that was okay because there wasn't much to do except read and I do that mostly laying down anyway, and I built a secondary shelter that was mostly a kind of shading lean-to, and from up there I had a really kind of picturesque view of the sunset, such as it was being orange and fucked up looking from city and airport pollution. Sometimes it was pretty harrowing, though, and one time in particular there was this storm, a rainstorm so violent I found out later it was some kind of record breaker in Chicago, and the next day shit was blown all over the place. I'd seen the clouds massing over the lake to the east before I went to sleep, and even then the wind was starting to pick up, but it was when I woke up in the middle of the night to what seemed like the building beneath me shattering, lightning ripping through the sky, my hands already gripping the frame of my shelter from the inside, I thought for sure it was going to carry me off but I was really paralyzed with fear, a real primal, animal fear that made me recognize the importance of a nice, cozy, environment controlled apartment. I was scared. There was this, though: I had Sean's pager, it was the only way anyone had of getting ahold of me. He had for reasons unknown decided to leave not a message identifying himself but a sigh, so sad and resigned it hurt to hear it, but still I wonder if somewhere in some phone company computer that sigh still exists, even now I almost wish I could remember the number and call it and hear his voice, if for no other reason than for it to make me cry like I did so many times while he was dying on that hospital bed for four days. With the storm raging around me, violently sucking and pulling the plastic bags and the not-so-waterproof shower curtain I decided to use as a ceiling, the pager buzzed, three times in quick succession, and risking death I dug it out of my pocket and via its tiny lamp I saw that it was Caroline, Sean's girlfriend, who had helped me gather the materials for my shelters and even donated to me a potted tree, which we struggled up the rungs one night and which I sometimes watered with my morning urination until it died of loneliness, trapped as it was on what may as well have been to it the surface of the moon or the polluted tarmac of an airport. Though I had no means of contacting her, between the seven digits of her number there was implied a message of both a refuge and more important a human connection, which did much to draw me back from the fear I felt in the face of the elements. Eventually the violence of the storm moved off to the west but the rain came heavily down, and tiring of arcing my body away from the consistent drool of the rainwater that seeped through the tight fibers of the shower curtain no matter how many times I smacked the bulge away I decided to chance sleeping in the basement of the apartment. There was a rug down there for reasons unknown in a dingy room with no door. I slept as best I could amongst the paint cans and old air conditioners and filthy tools and other cast off utilitarian items, jumping to my feet all through the night and darting into a small adjoining room every time I heard a sound that seemed closer than the general din of the tenants above me. I lived there until one night when my parents came out to the city with my uncle who lives in Florida and my brother and sister and c few cousins and we all went to of all places Kingston Mines, a blues club in Lincoln Park and a place I would never have gone to except under those exact conditions, which were apparently the ones that led to me getting drunk for the first time with my parents and watching my dad order "Two cum dogs!" at The Weiners(sic) Circle amidst an atmosphere of good-natured insults flinging back and forth between the employees of The Weiners Circle and its drunken patrons, after which point I ate my cum dog and said my goodbyes and went home to my little moonscape to find that I'd been ratted out or discovered and all elements of my illicit domicile, including Sean's old messenger bag filled with clothes and my water-logged copy of Catcher in the Rye, wiped clean and clear, and I sat there, drunk, staring at nothing and then my hands and then nothing again, until I sought shelter at a friends place in Logan Square, who was home but couldn't hear me, and so I slept in relative comfort and safety on a lawn chair in his back yard, blotting out the constant wailing of sirens of all kinds with my discman and Crashing Waves sound effects CD on repeat. Eventually I remembered that I'd lived right above a little food mart back then, and when I found that I got the exact address and I found the image taken from all the way out in orbit and there was me, laying on the rooftop, reading a book probably. If only I'd have known the exact moment when that picture was snapped.