Where the day takes you
Stopping and starting, a very large, very cream yellow, very old and very wide car lurched backward down Dewey Avenue, and then into the driveway where it jolted and nearly crashed into the garage door before screeching to a halt right there.
No sooner had it arrived than a long haired boy who looked like he might be no more than fifteen leapt from the porch and into the car, and then with another jolt, the driver made it to the curb, looked both ways and turned so sharply south he almost went over the curb. Max Farrow swerved down Dewey, declaring, “Now it’s time to head home.”
“Do you always drive like this?” asked the improbably named Jamal Lee.
“No,” Max said. “I usually don’t drive at all.”
“What?”
Max turned to Jamal as if he was not driving, and the car tilted toward the curb again as he listed:
“One, I don’t like to drive.”
“Well, we’ve got public transport.”
“One: I’m legally blind.”
“What?”
“And three… I’m unlicensed.”
“Oh, fuck.”
Jamal tried to look for the good side of this.
“Well, I mean, just cause you’re not licensed doesn’t mean you can’t—”
“It’s actually because I never learned to drive anyway,” Max casually confessed as his foot landed on the break just in time before they sailed out onto Ridge Avenue.
“I’m really just winging it. But I got here in one piece, so I guess we’ll be fine.” Max shrugged
“Can you get my rolling papers?”
“Max—” Jamal interrupted him. “I’m so glad you got me.”
“Anytime, man.”
“And do you want me to roll the joint instead?”
“I would love that. Really, I would love a bowl. Or a vape. Vapes are so nice. But if you can roll a j that would be heaven.”
“But I was going to say,” the white boy beside Max said, “maybe you could let me drive.”
Max blinked in the middle of his crooked careening down Ridge.
“Well, now I hadn’t thought of that. I mean, I was relying on myself, but of course. You’re here now.”
Jamal nodded.
“Are you a good driver?”
“Uh…” Jamal frowned as cars all around them leaned on their horns in rage.
“I think I could handle it.”
Passing main street, Max casually veered across a lane of terrified drivers and parked before Saint Nicholas, the old red brick Catholic church. He and Jamal switched sides and Jamal said, “Didn’t you say that was your church?”
“It was my boyhood church,” Max declared in a stately tone, and he took the joint Jamal had rolled and put a lighter to it. “But then I was cruelly taken away from my old Chicago home and exiled to Ohio for lo so many years and behold, when I had returnef, they gutted out this fucker and I don’t even recognize it anymore.”
Slipping back into the El Camino, Max Farrow took another deep puff off the joint, and while he was coughing, passed it to Jamal.
“Yes,” he said, eyes watering, gathering his voice as he took back the joint and Jamal continued on their drive south, “me in the passenger’s seat and you driving is definitely a much better idea.”
“This is Jamal,” Max introduced the white boy. “He’s Kayla’s boyfriend.”
“The one you went to get?” Darius said.
“Yes sir,” said Jamal.
“Don’t call me that. Don’t ever call me that. How the fuck old do I look to you?”
“I don’t know, sir” Jamal said.
“No,” Darius said. “Tell me how old I look.”
“You might as well,” Max said. “No getting out of it now.”
“I don’t know… forty.”
“Forty!” Darius almost shouted.
“Thirty…. Five.”
“That’s a little better,” Darius decided.
“Well, how old are you?”
“This boy has no manners,” Darius told Max.
“Sorry, sir,” said Jamal
“I’m forty-five,” Darius said.
“Well, then…”
“Don’t,” Max warned.
“Well, then I did guess you were younger than you are—”
“But you didn’t guess young enough. What the fuck forty-five year old wants to be told they look forty?”
“We need to get this car back,” Max decided.
“Right,” Darius nodded. “Who’d you get it from?”
“I don’t know,” Max said.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean,” Max said, slowing down and stretching his words out, “I donnnnnn’t knooooow.”
“How can you not know?”
“Cause I stole it.”
“You stole a car?”
“I had to get Jamal.”
“Why didn’t you take the El?”
“There was an El fire. A flat out fucking El fire on Fullerton. And the El was shut down, and you know how fucking slow the buses are. So, I stole a car off of Magnolia.”
“Should we just take the car to Magnolia?”
“Well, then they might see us, and they might be looking for it,” Darius said, and Max nodded sagely as if he hadn’t stolen the car in the first place.
“We could….” Max decided, “call the police and tell them that we thought this car was stolen…”
“That’s so…” Jamal began.
“Practical,” Darius decided.
“Should I ask,” Max began, “what you were doing at the house on Asbury and why I needed to get you so quickly?”
Jamal looked at Max.
He said, “No.”
“It was a very ill fated drug deal.”
“I thought you didn’t want to tell.”
“I didn’t want to tell,” Jamal said. “But then you were just going to ask anyway.”
“I really wasn’t,” Max said.
“No?”
Max looked at the younger boy.
“You keep on making the mistake of thinking I’m far more interested in your life than I am.”
“Oh,” Jamal said, not knowing if he should feel offended or not.
“Well, are you going to tell it?”
“You said you didn’t care.”
“I said I wouldn’t have asked, but since you brought it up… Tell it.”
They were at the end of the long hallway of the apartment building on Kenmore Street, where the door let onto a dizzying fire escape and gave a view of Lake Michigan, blue green and stretched to the hazy horizon.
“Well, these kids from Wilmette said they wanted LSD, and could I bring some, and I had made some recently—”
“You made LSD?”
“You know I make shrooms, right? Grow them?”
“Yes, but you didn’t say shit about LSD.”
“Well, I make it, and I made it, and I went to Wilmette to sell it, and when I get there it’s these guys in shirts and ties and they’re all over me like—”
“The FBI?”
“No, no,” Jamal waved that away. “They’re Mormons.”
“The fuck?”
“It turns out I got it mixed up, and here I am in Wilmette and I’m like, what the fuck, it’s the LDS, and they wanted to talk about the Gospel, and I was like fuck all this, and what do I do now, so I got on the phone, and rode the Purple Line and ended up at Asbury, and that’s where I sold some to this guy, and I was with him for a bit until he tells me he thinks he’s a piranha and starts biting me, and that’s when I run the fuck out and I’m on my way to the El when I look at the tracker and it tells me that, what the fuck, the El is down, and so I call you, thinking you’ll send Darius—”
“But Darius was at work.”
“And then you show up in that car.”
“I miss that car.”
“It was a nice car,” Jamal agreed.
“So, when I came to that particular house on Asbury… that wasn’t the house of the guy who thought he was a fish?”
“No, no!” I was walking down the street and he came after me, and so I leapt into the alley and then ran down the street till I found that house and snuck in.”
“Good thing no one was in there,” Max noted.
Jamal blinked at him.
“What?”
“Good thing,” Jamal said, “I got out of there before the people living there could chase me.”
“Are we felons?”
“You stole a car, I broke into a house. I think we’re only felons if we get caught.”
“Um,” Max nodded philosophically. “That’s a good way to look at it.”
“I gotta lot a shit left over,” Jamal said, slapping his jeans pocket. “You wanna trip balls?”
Max shrugged.
“Sure.”
“The thing about this shit is that you wait for it to start working, and then the moment you realize it’s working, you realize it’s been working for about an hour.”
“Exactly,” Jamal said in a calm voice while the two of them sat on the beach, watching the waves wash the sand.
“If we were in Michigan we could watch the sun set over the beach,” Jamal said.
“The one thing we’re robbed of, living in Chicago, is we can’t watch the sunset over the beach.”
“You know,” Max noted, “though the rational part of me knows those waves are not little tiny horses, the more I see little tiny horses the more I think of them as little tiny horses, the more I see little tiny horses.”
Jamal threw back his head and neighed. Max burst out laughing. and Jamal rose, cantering around the beach and neighing while a little girl laughed and Max spread out over the damp sand and looked at the stretched of white and grey clouds in the sky.
Jamal had forgotten himself and trotted across the beach, and while he was doing so, Max turned to look at him and wondered if he could turn him into a centaur. A long chestnut horse’s body stretched out from Jamal’s backside, and Jamal rose up, his hair tossing as he neighed at the few people on the little beach and galloped toward Max.
The hooves of the centaur stopped just inches from Max, but he wasn’t afraid. Shaking his great mane, Jamal said, “The night is young as fuck. Let’s do something!”
“The El’s back up.”
“Fucking El!”
“Fucking El,” Max agreed, “that made us into thieves. And now we don’t even need it, cause you’re a cen… well, now you’re just full a horse.”
“Yeah, you can fucking ride on my back.”
“You might get tired of it by the time we get to Bryn Mawr, but I could. What glossy flanks you have!”
“Why thank you,” Jamal said, caressing his flanks vainly, and then tossing back his head and neighing again.
“What am I?” Max asked.
“A chocolate sundae.”
“Because I’m Black?”
“I’d say no,” Jamal said, “except honestly, the answer is probably yes and I’m a Freudian racist. But now that I’ve committed to you being a chocolate sundae, its done and there’s no turning back.”
“Do I look delicious?”
“You are three scoops of three different types of chocolate, and my favorite is Belgian.”
“That does sounds delicious.”
“It sounds like a waffle.”
“Stop waffling around and made a decision about where we should go. See what I did?”
“I see what you did,” Jamal said. “And I see that your head just turned into a balloon and is getting ready to fly away. Catch it. You got it! Good.”
“Have you been to Little Amsterdam?”
“Little Amsterdam. Little Amsterdam?”
“Yes.”
“No,” Jamal said, no longer a horse and looking as excited as a kid, which Max conceded, he sort of was.
“You wanna go?” he asked.
Jamal grinned at him.
“Hell, yeah!”
At the Thorndale El Station, Max and Jamal went to the machine, and pretended to buy a ticket for the El before Max to the handicap gate with a dead ticket he held up to the reader He reached around the latch and pushed it opened, walking through and taking Jamal with him. They sped up the steps to the platform and Jamal said, “I thought they were cracking down on that.”
“They were, but not today, and the girl at the desk did not seem to give one good shit.”
“I used to be afraid we’d get arrested for doing shit like that,” Jamal said.
“Me too. But I think I’m more afraid of not trying.”
The Red Line came rattling south from Howard Street and they got on a fairly empty car which carried them south and out of Edgewater.
“Is little Amsterdam in Andersonville?”
“Fuck Andersonville, and not quite,” Max said.
“I don’t know much about it,” Jamal said. “Andersonville.”
Max shrugged.
“They just ain’t my kind of fags.”
When they got off on Argyle and were trotting down the steps, Max said, “And this is what I hate about Buena Park, if we are in Buena Park, and I think we are—we’re trying to get the fuck ot Argyle Street, but where is the Argyle Street stop? Not on Argyle. We’re on fucking Winona, and who asked to be there?
“It’s basically impersonating another street,” Jamal declared.
“It absolutely is impersonating another street.”
“It’s street fraud.”
“Street food.”
“I said street fraud.”
“Yes, I know But that made me want street food.”
As they walked down Kenton Avenue with its brightly painted shops and wide boulevards, cars trawling slowly up and down, Max said, “I don’t see any street food. But we could go into a restaurant and eat the food outside. Then it would be street food.”
“Then it would be homeless people food,” Jamal said.
“Should we have brought Darius with us?”
“No, this is not his kind of a party.”
They found Argyle shooting east when it should have gone west, and maybe their directions were wrong, but when Max asked a fellow Negro in a blue mesh tank top with a purple beard where Clark was, he pointed in the other direction.
“I have a theory,” Max said, and when they turned back to where they’d started, he went down a block or so until he saw a west bound side of Argyle and Jamal said, “If I had to wander through early evening Chicago tripping balls, then I’m glad I’m doing it wth you.”
“I’d be terrified to do it by myself,” Max admitted, and for some reason he hated traveling down this inside street, all covered over in trees and made of building after building of the same old brick. He would have felt better on a main street, but suddenly they were coming onto Clark Street and Jamal decided, “We should definitely take a bus back.”
“We should have kept that car.”
“Except you can’t drive,” Jamal reminded him.
“I loved that car.”
“And also, it wasn’t ours.”
“There is that,” Max remembered.
“If you love something, set it free.”
“And then it will come back if it was yours, but if it never was….”
“Well, it actually never was,” Jamal pointed out. “And look.”
There was an old brick shop and at the locked front door was a blue sign that read LITTLE AMSTERDAM,,and by the blackened windows: Come in through the back.
