At a Lonely L Stop

November, 2017

Every year at this time, there’s a massive work project that usually necessitates me staying late. This is a pain, because the office is in downtown Chicago, and my house, as most of you are probably aware, is in a quiet, but weird, suburban village.

In case you’re not a Chicagoan, let me explain: there are two kinds of train. If you live pretty much anywhere within the city, you can take the ‘L’ (short for ‘elevated’) trains around. They’re kind of like your typical subway: they run every few minutes, making all the stops, 24 hours a day. It’s not a super fancy ride, but it gets you there, pretty quickly and cheaply. (Sometimes the train lines are elevated, sometimes they’re at ground level, and sometimes they’re a story or two underground. I didn’t name them.)

To get out to the suburbs, you have to take the Metra–slightly more expensive, slightly fancier, and a way bigger pain. The trains are much less frequent, and the schedule is rigidly timed and confusing, with each train only making a handful of the 25 or so potential stops. After about 6:00 PM, they only run one train per hour, and it makes ALL the stops.

This particular night, we finished up about 6:45–late enough that I missed the last Metra express to the suburbs, and that I wouldn’t make the one train for the 7:00 hour. For nights like this, rather than sit around waiting, I have a cheat code in my back pocket–my parents live a short distance away from a Blue Line ‘L’ stop, and are usually nice enough to gift me a ride home if I stop by. So, instead of schlepping over to Union Station, I descended into Chicago’s Pedway.

…’Ped’ as in ‘pedestrian’, out-of-towners. A cool thing about Chicago, that I only learned once I started working downtown, is that from my very own office building all the way to City Hall, there are a series of underground tunnels that allow you get to a huge chunk of the city without braving the car traffic. My route takes me past a subterranean entrance to Marshall Field’s (forever Marshall Field’s, NEVER Macy’s); through Block 37, a mall that opens to the surface on State Street and dives down several stories, containing both a Disney Store and the best grilled cheese place I’ve ever encountered; then past the Red Line stop; then the Blue Line.

The whole route was eerily deserted. I never realized how quickly Chicago clears out once all the office workers go home for the day. An hour before, it would have been a wretched hive of scum and villainy, crowded with people rushing to catch their trains, dodging around street musicians playing for tips, all the sounds of the rush hour commute echoing off the concrete walls. Now, it was just me and three homeless guys (two napping; one trying to sell me Streetwise) and my footsteps echoing around by themselves. All the shops in Block 37 were shuttered for the night.

Even with all that emptiness, I was surprised to pass through the turnstile and find that I was the only passenger waiting at the Blue Line stop. That had never happened before. It was ten minutes until the next train toward O’Hare, and I couldn’t get a cell signal this far underground, so I looked around at all the ad posters and tried to amuse myself.

After eating up some time trying to translate a lengthy, serious-looking ad from Spanish to English (it appeared to be seeking participants for medication clinical trial) I heard footsteps descending the concrete stairs to the platform.

As both an introvert and a female that frequently navigates the city alone, I knew better than to make obvious eye contact, but I got an idea of my fellow platform occupant through peripheral vision. About my age. About my height. Emo glasses. Dressed like it’s Seattle in the 90s. Neckbeard.

I pulled out my phone and starting reading an e-book to discourage interaction.

Fortunately, Neckbeard wandered toward the opposite end of the platform, until he was behind the column of stairs and out of my sight. Good.

Blissful silence. Back to the book.

Mr. Collins was at leisure to look around him and admire, and he was so much struck with the size and furniture of the apartment that he declared he might almost have supposed himself in the small summer breakfast room at Rosings, a comparison that did not at first convey much gratification; but when Mrs. Philips undertook from him what Rosings was, and who was its proprietor, when she had listened to the description of only one of Lady Catherine’s drawing-rooms, and found that the chimney-piece alone had cost eight hundred pounds, she felt all the force of the compliment, and would hardly have resented a comparison with the housekeeper’s room…

A sound pricked at my ears and took me out of the book. It was coming from the other side of the column of stairs.

It was the sound of a thin stream of liquid hitting concrete at a constant and sustained rate for several seconds.

There is no running water on the Blue Line platform.

I made a face and went back to my book.

In describing to her all the grandeur of Lady Catherine and her mansion, with occasional digressions in praise of his own humble abode and the improvements it was receiving, he was happily employed until the gentlemen joined them; and he found in Mrs. Philips a very attentive listener, whose opinion of his consequence increased with what she heard, and who was resolving to retail it all among her neighbors as soon as she could…

Footsteps on concrete echoed toward me, ambling slowly in my general direction.

I read harder.

To the girls, who could not listen to their cousin, and who had nothing to do but wish for an instrument, and examine their own indifferent imitations of china on the mantelpiece, the interval of waiting appeared very long…

Neckbeard was back in my peripherals, and though I was too distracted to keep reading, I stubbornly refused to look at him. For several long, tense seconds, I thought he was going to walk up to me. To my relief, he instead ambled up to the train system map several feet behind me.

Once I was sure I was safe, I tried to find my place again, but before I could, Neckbeard addressed the room at large: “Do you know how to get to Navy Pier from here?”

Well.

I wonder who he could be talking to?

The Disney cast member in me couldn’t dismiss a request for assistance, even from an obvious eccentric. I zipped my phone into my coat pocket and turned to face the map, but I already knew it would be complicated. “There’s no good way from here,” I said, the map confirming my suspicions. “You’ll probably have to walk to the Red Line stop and take it to Grand…but there’ll still be like a mile-plus walk on the other end. There might be a bus you can catch. Your phone would probably tell you. …It might be faster to just take an Uber.”

It was clear from the studied way in which he continued to pretend to look at the map that everything I’d just said may as well have been addressed to the wall. He made a few contemplative noises that were clearly intended to convey that he would take my information under advisement, but clearly I didn’t know what I’m talking about.

“The, um, Red Line’s only a block northeast,” I said. “Back up the stairs and left.”

He did not take his gaze from the map. He certainly did not move toward the stairs.

I shrugged and took a step back toward the spot where I’d been standing.

“You know why it’s called Navy Pier, right?”

My back was to him now, so he couldn’t see me roll my eyes. “Because it used to be a Navy Yard?”

“Yeah. It was a total wreck ever since, until they built it up a few years ago.”

I knew that to be untrue. It had been the University of Illinois-Chicago campus and a few other things during the intervening years. I weighed the satisfaction of out-trivia-ing someone against the annoyance of further interaction with Neckbeard, and opted to reach for my phone and start reading again.

In the few beats of silence before I did, he started flailing words at me again. “I live there, you know.”

I looked back at him. “At Navy Pier?” I asked. I was positive he didn’t. As far as I know, there were no apartments on the pier.

“Not at the Pier,” he said, dismissing it as if that was the silliest idea he’d ever heard. “At a place called Lake Point Tower. Do you know what that is?”

Okay. The condescension was not lost on me. Every Chicagoan surely knows what Lake Point Tower is. But in case you’re not familiar, it’s this place:

The weird, wavy building that was illegally built way, way closer to Lake Michigan’s shoreline than any other building, making it one of the most iconic skyscrapers in town. In the movie While You Were Sleeping, they made Peter Gallagher’s character live there to convey the idea that he was very, very rich.

I thought it extremely unlikely that Neckbeard lived there.

“Yes,” I finally answered him. “You live there, huh?”

“Yep,” he said proudly.

“Huh.” If you actually lived there, I thought, you would know the best way to get there. …Which is to spring for an Uber. Which you could afford if you lived at Lake Point Tower. It would probably only cost like six bucks. Just get an Uber.

His persistent presence on this, the exactly wrong train platform to get him where he was going, told me that 1) he probably couldn’t afford to Uber everywhere, and 2) he probably wasn’t actually going to Lake Point Tower.

My underwhelming response apparently irked him, and he decided to raise the stakes a bit. “You know the weekend?”

I almost responded, “You mean like, three days from now?” But I had a feeling that wasn’t what he meant. I wracked my brain–wasn’t there something on the radio, some popular songs, and a purposely misspelled name…The Weeknd?

“…You mean the group?” I asked dubiously.

“The artist,” he scoffed. His voice had an unexpectedly sharp, incredulously offended edge to it, as if wondering how I could possibly not know who The Weeknd was. (The answer to this, as most of you probably know, is that my music taste is almost entirely showtunes, popular music from before 1999, and the works of John Williams.)

“Okay,” I said, with a slight shrug and no other visible reaction.

“I’m his backup musician.”

“Are you?” I repeated with zero inflection in my voice. I was on conversation autopilot now, making the same polite noises I make when people try to explain football to me in great detail.

“Yep. Just got back from a tour of Europe. And Asia.”

“Wow.” I started reading ads in Spanish again.

“I play several instruments,” he added. “And I sing.”

“Do you?” I’m gonna say probably not.

Finally, I heard an approaching roar farther down the tunnel, and felt a whoosh of air that signaled a train was making its way toward me at speed. I turned back and flashed Neckbeard a smile. “Sorry, my train’s almost here.” Thank God.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, it was nice talking to you.” He stepped toward me, extending his hand for a handshake.

Without thinking, I took it, grateful that he was accepting the natural end of this painful conversation with grace and not trying to ask if we could be Facebook friends or something. Then, as he dropped his hand, turned, and walked away, I left my hand hovering in the air in front of me, frozen.

…Because I had remembered that sound. That unmistakable sound, shortly after he first arrived on the platform, of a stream of urine hitting a concrete wall.

I boarded the train traumatized, and, upon selecting a seat from the myriad of choices presented to me, I began to search, one-handed, through my purse for my little bottle of Purell.

Maybe the Metra would have been the better choice tonight.