The Old Style

When someone in the south asks you where you’re from they don’t mean where are you living or where did you come from today, they mean where were you born. In that sense, I am from Chicago, born and half way raised. Often when I meet someone who says they are from Chicago and I say “Oh, me too.” I get “What part?”

“Foster and Sheridan,” I say, “North side, a few blocks from the lake.”

“Oh!” he says, “You’re from the city.” And it turns out they were from some suburb much farther out than Evanston or Oak Park.

My mom was born and raised in Chicago and maybe her kids got some of that Chicago prejudice against the suburbs. Maybe it’s easier to say you’re “from” Chicago so people know the area but wouldn’t it be just about as easy to say that you grew up in the suburbs of Chicago if that is really the case?

Anyway, I was born in Chicago, in our north side apartment two blocks from the lake. My brothers were born in Chicago too but they managed to get to a hospital for them – twins – it seemed safer.

Back then, in the ‘80s, Chicago still held a lot of working class families. You could still afford to be a working class person living there and raise your family. People I grew up around were born and raised there and had family ties that held them to the city. If you look at a demographic map now, the ultra rich of the lakefront butts right up against the ultra poor. Seems like that’s the only way you can afford to live in the city now, either make well over a hundred grand or be on welfare.

By the time we moved, all the kids in the neighborhood’s families had moved, mostly out to the suburbs. Our apartment was nice but mom and dad wanted a house and at least a yard. They wanted someplace where their kids could walk and not have to worry that they wandered into the wrong block (two blocks south and one west was a place I knew not to walk after dark even when I was little.) And we didn’t mind so much, we kids loved it there but, as I said, all the kids we had been growing up with had already moved.

We looked at a few places in some fancier neighborhoods in the city but I think my mom, the born and raised Chicago girl, didn’t see the suburbs as a place for her and already, as young as we were, we kids had that same prejudice – we were city kids, the suburbs weren’t for us.

In the end we moved way out to the wild west, to an old family farm my dad’s family was finally ready to part with. I was twelve and my brothers were nine. And it was never a big culture shock to us. We loved the wild, open spaces and the freedom to roam around the big ranch but we knew that no matter how long we lived in Oklahoma, we were from Chicago. We were city kids in some part of our heart.

But the city we grew up in, the working class families and old brick buildings were fading and disappearing every time we visited. The last time I recall feeling like I was in old Chicago was when I lived with my grandmother for a few months when I was 19. I hardly left her neighborhood. I worked at the gas station down the block and spent most of my time behind the counter reading books from her vast bookshelves in the basement full of the leftovers of her 7 plus kids years of reading.

“Dostoevsky? That’s pretty heavy reading for a gas station attendant!”

“That’ll be $6.50”

“The Idiot” was too good to bother what anyone thought about me.

The gas station has been torn down now. No attendants, just a self service car wash. Probably a financially sound choice for the company, nobody has to throw a Christmas party for an automatic car wash.

Every time we would visit it always seemed like some part or other of the Chicago we knew growing up was being erased; a few new townhouses here, a Starbucks there, the old bar on Lincoln shut down and the whole street filled with twenty or thirty something hipsters who looked like they wouldn’t know how to do a day’s worth of manual labor if their lives depended on it. The working class families might still be around but they weren’t in the old neighborhoods anymore.

When my Grandma up there died we all went up for a big wake before the funeral. At least the funeral home felt like old Chicago, brick and dark and just on a street corner in a neighborhood. Nothing fancy, nothing new about it. It seemed fitting. My Grandma was born and raised in Chicago, the west side. She had some stories; thank God my uncle took the time to ask her about a few of them. Just one more part of the old Chicago gone, one more part of the “greatest generation.”

One of my old friends showed up to the funeral. I hadn’t seen her in years, really hadn’t seen her much since her family moved out to the ‘burbs.

“Let’s go across the street and have a drink,” she says. “We’re adults now.”

We go into the corner bar across the street. It’s dark and smoky and I figure out where half the people at the wake are. I guess maybe you’re not supposed to eat but apparently there are no such restrictions on drinking. It is an Irish Catholic wake after all; I should have figured.

My friend orders a mixed drink, something just a little girly but still hard drinking, gin and juice or something like that. I order a beer, Corona with a lime I think.

“You want a glass with that?” The bartender asks.

She looks like a Chicagoan. She looks like a Chicago bartender and this is definitely not her first wake crowd. She looks authentic.

“Nah,” I say. “I’m good with the bottle.”

“’Atta girl!” She says and smiles as she puts the bottle in front of me.

Authentic.

The next time I’m at a bar in Chicago it’s about five or six years later. I’m visiting my cousin who’s living there now. He didn’t grow up there, he grew up in a small town in southern Illinois, one of those peaceful little towns where he and his siblings had one of those idyllic high school experiences and played sports and went to prom and, you know, good old middle America. He’s out of college now and he’s living in Chicago in one of those big beautiful old apartments that used to house a whole working class family and maybe some in-laws too. Now it’s just him and a roommate. They are in their late 20s or early 30s and both do some kind of work that you can do on a computer. They make college degree money (it’s the only way to afford those apartments now) and aren’t looking to get married and settle down. When they do it will probably be somewhere else.

“The city just feels so different” I say.

“I know the neighborhoods you grew up in are all gentrified,” he says. A fancy term for just what he and his friends are doing. “But let me take you some other places where you might feel a little more at home.”

We go through the Puerto Rican neighborhood and into a Ukranian or Polish neighborhood or something and we have some of the best cabbage soup I’ve ever had in my life. Maybe I’m starting to feel a little more at home. Maybe there are still some places in the city that feel like the city I grew up in.

Then we go to one of those neighborhood corner bars. It’s not his neighborhood exactly but he obviously frequents it. I look at their draft selections.

“I’ll have an Old Style” I tell the bartender.

“We’ve got PBR on sale for fifty cents cheaper” she says.

“Yeah, that’s ok,” I say. “I’ll take the Old Style.” I haven’t seen it on draft west of the Mississippi yet but I don’t bother to make excuses, I figure what does she care if I spend fifty cents more on my beer.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” she says. “PBR is on special.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll take the Old Style.”

She rolls her eyes a little and starts to get me my beer at which point my cousin feels the need to jump in.

“She’s from out of town.” He says. He’s trying to look authentic and make excuses for his poor dumb cousin. Poor girl, she’s an out of towner.

I take my beer without comment and lay odds to myself that the bartender isn’t anymore native Chicagoan than my cousin. They are just trying to look hip and get drunk cheap, loyalty to Chicago brands doesn’t mean anything to them. “Go ahead and try to look authentic,” I think. I know where I’m from.

My cousin’s shame in me mollified by his excuses for me, we head to the back room and he meets up with his friend and they spend the night playing ping pong. Of course they have to move around and do something, they’ve been behind a desk all day. I miss the bar patrons of my youth who sat and drank and stared straight ahead and smoked cigarettes and barely wanted to play darts because they had been working manual labor jobs all day. This place may look like an old Chicago bar, but I think that bartender out at my Grandma’s wake would have accepted “thanks but no thanks I’ll have an Old Style,” without giving me shit. Nobody here smokes, they’re too healthy. They have to go jogging tomorrow or whatever. Good for them I guess. Nobody said nostalgia made sense.

Years later we’re in town for a family thing. My laptop class brother is already in town, he’s probably getting paid for his days off. My working class brother could only take a couple days off, and you know he’s not getting paid for them. Well, he’d go crazy at a desk job anyway. He’s flying in late the night before the festivities start and he’s taking the El into town. I volunteer to go pick him up from the nearest El station.

We’re a little farther South than I’m used to but this neighborhood feels like home. There are every sort of people walking by and a few homeless people lingering under the tracks. I circle the block a few times but the El is running behind. My brother sends me a text, probably a fifteen minute delay. I find a parking spot down a side street and pace back and forth across from the station for a bit. My brother texts me again, still not moving, at least another fifteen minutes. I make my decision and head into the Irish bar across the street.

There’s a doorman checking IDs. Pearl Jam is playing the next night and the place is full of hipsters, half of whom probably weren’t born when Pearl Jam started. They are wearing combat boots and flannel shirts and drinking craft beers and trying to look authentic.

“I’m just waiting to pick my brother up from the El,” I tell the doorman. He doesn’t even give me shit about my Oklahoma ID.

“I’ll keep an eye out for him,” he says. Maybe I look more like a normal person than this crowd of out of towners. Oh well, they are paying his salary right?

I grab a spot in the front corner of the bar by the window. The place is packed but the bartender doesn’t leave me waiting. She looks like a Chicagoan somehow. What makes me think that? Maybe it’s her attitude.

“Coors light?” I say. Hey, I’m in my 30s now, I gotta watch the carbs.

She shakes her head.

“Miller light?” she says.

“Yeah that’s fine.” I nod so she can be sure over the noise in the place.

The beer is cold and I pay cash and tip her probably the same as the beer.

“Let me know if you need anything else,” she says.

I nod and sit with my beer, looking at the crowd of hipsters and thinking about old Chicago. I’m about half way done when I see the doorman pointing my brother to me.

“Buy you a beer?”

“Sure.” He starts looking over the chalk board over my head.

“They’ve got Old Style for three bucks,” I say.

“Yeah, that sounds good,” he says.

He looks like a Chicagoan despite the years away. He looks like his namesake Uncle, an old Chicago bartender. Somehow, he looks authentic.

The bartender doesn’t leave him waiting either.

“Old Style,” he says.

She nods and takes my money and gives us exactly zero shit about anything.

I lift my beer up to ‘cheers’ him.

“Welcome home,” I say.

“Thanks.”

We sit at the bar without talking much. We’re here for the funeral of his namesake uncle. Another part of old Chicago gone. Another part of our childhood, another part of our family ties to the city.

A city isn’t just buildings and streets and jobs, it’s the people who tie it together. I shouldn’t complain too much, we left too, and all of us kids understood why. That brother sitting next to me got into enough fights as a teenager in our little town, he might not be sitting next to me now if we’d stayed. His temper is calm now and he’s become a master of self control but he was a loose cannon ten years ago. But somehow he still looks at home here. We’re not afraid of the people on the streets. Somehow we’re part of the Old Style, so to speak. Part of what’s lost, part of a city that died and is replaced by town houses and Starbucks.

We finish our beers and head out to say goodbye to another missing part of the city, just like us. Oh well, at least we never became suburbanites.