The Most Useless Neighborhood in Chicago

Whenever my family makes incredulous noises about how I can possibly live in a major city, I remind them of two things: First, I don’t make enough money to support a car-driving habit and would therefore quickly die in the suburbs. Second, if going out to dinner might mean eating an entire deep-fried onion, however cleverly marketed and packaged, death could not come quick enough.

Not that I don’t enjoy visiting the suburbs. The driveways, the backyards, the star-drenched skies viewed from outdoor furniture in a backyard deck, the alcohol that someone’s father or brother-in-law paid for—it all makes me kind of giddy. But I’m always relieved to return to the city. After all, I tell myself as I see the skyline emerging over the Eisenhower Expressway, the city is rich with conveniences. There’s something to do 24 hours a day. You can get anything you want when you live in a major city.

Unless, that is, you’re in the Bermuda triangle of my neighborhood. My neighborhood kind of sucks. It’s not really even a neighborhood. It’s an awkward convergence of neighborhoods where no one appears to feel entirely comfortable. Except for the one armed troll-like man with the untrained pit-bull at the end of the block. He looks comfortable. But he’s another story. A creepy story.

True enough, the residents are a delightful mix of ethnicities and socio-economic strata. And yet we are unified by one thing. Apparently we are all expected to be preternaturally voracious consumers of cupcakes.

What happened was, last Sunday afternoon, I ran out of soy milk. (I didn’t run out, actually. But rather, I came to that last quarter cup or so at the bottom of the carton that isn’t enough to fully saturate a bowl of grape-nuts and so I let it sit there long enough to become convinced it’s probably turned bad by now. I’m not sure I have ever truly run out of soy milk.) So I went out to pick up some. My neighborhood is one of those little business districts where most streets are lined with storefronts. So you’d think this errand would be lickety-split, right? Just the kind of convenience I’m supposed to enjoy as part of the divine right of being a city-dweller. But if you look behind the fronts of those stores, you’ll find nary a splash of soy milk. On a Sunday afternoon in my neighborhood, you can buy a bicycle. You can rent any number of DVDs in Spanish, Arabic, and at least two African languages. You can buy a back-pack be-weighted-down with bedazzling. You can buy cheap wine at a madly inflated price. You can buy all manner of candy with names and slogans that appear to actually be written in Pidgen English by the characters that comprised the extras on M*A*S*H (and I wish I could recommend more highly the “You Make Super Happy Crack Honey Bar” but it tastes oddly tangy). Or you and you can armor the tips of your fingers in long, dangerously encrusted with jagged stuff, fake fingernails. What you cannot do is buy things you might actually need. That is, of course, unless you prefer to subsist on a diet primarily composed of boutique coffees and Cupcakes, Cupcakes, Cupcakes!

The problem crystallized as I waited to cross the street and walk too, too many blocks to a fully stocked grocery store. A couple stood at the corner nearby, one of them on a cell phone. They were trying to explain to some friends where to meet them.

It’s right between the occult magic shop and the day spa… no not THAT occult magic shop and day spa. If you’re looking at an occult magic shop and day spa that are right next to each other, you need to go down half a block and look on the other side of the street. Do you see that store with all the lingerie and Sponge Bob alarm clocks in the window? Just past that, there’s a cupcake place. Next to that there’s a tanning salon, but not the tanning salon with the big banner that says they do teeth whitening…Yes, that’s next to a cupcake place too, but the tanning salon I’m talking about is directly across from the cowboy boot store that sells small electronics. If you look just past THAT tanning salon, you’ll see another occult magic shop and day spa, and we’re at the board game place between them!

I should have stuck around to see if the couple managed to successfully connect with their friend. Instead I got preoccupied with counting the magic shops in my neighborhood. Maybe the owners of these occult shops are thinking we can just buy a book that will tell us how to conjure soy milk. But then, only in the last couple of years have soy milk manufacturers been able to rid the stuff of the lake of fire aftertaste. I fear the conjured version would just set us back to the 1997 version of soy milk.

And ya know—you’d think when the occult shop competition heats up, those guys would be hexing each other right and left. Heaping bad luck and whatnot upon one another. It honestly makes me wonder why there aren’t more inexplicable sulfuric smelling explosions in my neighborhood during, say, the witching hour. But so far, nothing. Just the predictable holiday gunfire out back in the alley. (Which I’m pretty sure is the doing of the one armed troll-guy at the end of the block.)

I griped about the soy milk dilemma to my mother last night, who currently inhabits two of America’s finest suburbs, depending upon the season. Not knowing what soy milk actually is or why in Heaven’s name, anyone would need to drink it, she was unimpressed with my suffering. She cannot imagine a world without big restaurants with parking lots and high-school girl servers and remarkably similar menus among them. And she thinks I should be more appreciative of the cupcakes.