Winter came early that year and I soaked it in like a rag under running water. My roommate had vanished into the thin, midwestern air. I was learning how to live alone. He phoned about two months after his disappearance. “Rehab,” he told me. “First, it was the emergency room. Now, I’m in rehab. Sorry 'bout that.”
The university moved me to a Single on the top floor of my dormitory. It was a corner room, so half the walls were windows—ceiling-to-floor. Even through the suicide grates, the view was spectacular. I’d never had a room where you could turn in two directions and still see the sky.
It was the first winter of my life really. Back in LA, it never grew colder than 50 degrees—mittens, earmuffs, coats, and cocoa were foreign concepts to me. I had never seen a street freeze before, let alone snowfall; so, when I woke up that December to white powder falling from the sky, for a split-second I thought it was ashes—that the mountains were on fire again.
I was underweight—20 years old, 5’11, and nearly 120 pounds. My old roommate thought I had an eating disorder. He used to portion off sections of his meals for me—scraping them into bowls that I licked clean like a stray. After he was gone, I subsisted on a diet of adderall, cigarettes, three bottles of wine, and one pepperoni pizza Hot Pocket a day. Usually, it was all thrown up after bottle number two. Nubile, hairless, and starving—the men who fucked me that winter enjoyed calling me smooth.
On daily pilgrimages to 7/11, I’d cut through Death Alley—a local landmark adjacent to my dorm. In 1903, the theater next door caught fire. Bodies leapt out of windows like fleas off a dying dog and over 600 bodies were burnt to a crisp, or suffocated in the fumes. The alley was stacked with corpses; apparently, the pile stood over 6 feet tall1. Day drinking and chainsmoking the cheapest cigarettes the Loop had to offer—my friends and I often stared at the tourists who walked through Death Alley. In those moments, it was difficult not to feel like history.
G sat on a cardboard carpet at the end of the alley every morning. He was an older man with a patchy, gray beard. Wrinkles sunk into his face like they’d been carved in by a dagger. He wore frayed, fingerless gloves that revealed nails chewed to the bone. G’s legs ran down into amputated nubs at his ankles—he had no feet. Beside him at all times was a shabby red bicycle.
“Hello hello, hope you’re having a blessed morning.” He shook the same Big Gulp cup every day. White folks walked out of the theater next door and right past G. Despite the repetition, he always seemed genuine. Every time I looked into his cup, it was empty.
I never had any money, but every morning that winter I’d offer up a Lucky Strike.
“Damn boy. This shit is what we smoked in prison!”
Whenever I asked him what he wanted from 7/11, he always said the same thing.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything else? Chips, or coffee, or a sandwich, or something?”
“Nah man, just get me them little bears.”
I shrugged, and used my food stamps to buy his Haribo and my Hot Pockets. A (now defunct) Discover card covered the wine.2 My face poked out of thrifted cashmere and wool, wearing a tired smile. The 7/11 employees never carded me. I guess it was only my body that looked young.
G would make space on his damp cardboard and I’d sit with him, chainsmoking until my fingers froze. At night, G slept in the Pedway, it was open 24/7 and heated. I preferred parking garages. They were always desolate, well-lit, and warm enough to shed your layers. I often wandered the streets hunting for ones tall enough to kill me. Around the 6th or 7th story, I always passed out in the stairwell, never making it to the rooftop. I recommended to G my favorite ones to sleep in.
Like all old men, G loved telling stories about himself. Tales gleaming with lessons he never quite knew how to articulate. While chewing on his ashy finger stubs one morning, he told me about the exorcism that killed his sister. How—when he was just a little boy—they tied her to a bed and a priest ripped her demons out with prayer. She convulsed, shrieking gibberish and foaming at the mouth.
“Did it work? Did they get the demons out?”
“No,” he said while chewing on a gummy bear. “The devil took her away.”
Through my bolted, top-floor windows, G looked like an ant. I’d pull out my wine and drink until the sky turned black. Watching him. Waiting to see him get on that bicycle and peddle away. I never did. He sat there all day shaking his empty cup—tiny, footless, and stationary—and in the blink of an eye, he’d be gone.
Christmas came and went that year. I don't remember it.
I spent a lot of time finding men online to keep me warm. Specifically searching for the ones I knew would hurt me the most. Ones who opened with messages like 'Sup faggot' or 'You’re so skinny. I bet I could see my fat cock thrusting inside you.'
If they were old, I’d have them pick me up in their Benz or Beemer and blow them on the way to their place. Promises of cocaine or liquor were broken in their beds. I’d sigh—huffing the consolation of their poppers—and roll over. After they finished, they usually made me take the train home.
If the men were around my age I’d invite them over. Check them into the building. Make awkward small talk in the elevator. Ask things like “so what’s your major?” I’d smile politely as they whispered dull responses like “I’m gonna break you” into my ear.
It was a slow winter. Oftentimes, when I hosted, I laid stiff as a board. Watching snow fall from the sky. Thinking about home. When it was over, I had to escort them out—dorm policy. This was always the worst bit. After someone beats, jackhammers, strangles, and insults you—elevator rides become unbearable. I tried not to tremble as I watched them writhe in the guilty sludge of their own post-nut clarity.
“Have a good day man,” I remember telling one of them as he walked out the door. He turned to me with a scowl, like I had just farted in church. With a shrug, I lit a cigarette and watched him walk away.
“God got me through it,” G told me one morning.
Whenever he talked about life in prison, I liked to imagine him sitting cross-legged in his bed reading the bible. In those daydreams, I never knew if I should picture him still having feet.
“Every day I prayed to him, in that hell, every day. And it was through him, through his forgiveness….” he trailed off into silence, popping a gummy bear in his mouth. He held the bag out.
As my fingers dug for a gummy, he peered into me—like he was treasure-hunting for my soul. He frowned. “You’re carrying something.”
I ashed my cigarette into a puddle of icy slush and squirmed, tossing a gummy bear in my mouth.
“There’s a weight on your heart boy. But you’re good, I can tell it. You are.”
I stuck my hands into my sleeves and tickled the scabs on my forearms.
“Maybe,” I replied. “I don’t really know.”
“Whatever it is you’re holding,” he went on, “whatever it is you’re carrying. God loves you. God forgives you.”
“I hope so,” I told him. And with a smile, I started walking.
I walked through the Loop—past the Picasso sculpture that I slid down on drunk nights—through the playground I danced in every time I took molly—along the frozen waste of Lake Michigan as joggers trotted by—I took a piss off an empty harbor. I made it all the way to Navy Pier.
It was New Year’s Eve.3 The lake was vast and its waves shook with frosted tips. Armed with a bottle of wine, I sat on a bench between families and drank out my coatsleeve. I sparked a cigarette and tried to blow the smoke away but the wind carried it toward the children. Then, I had the bench to myself.
The fireworks began. They launched into the sky like rockets from a dock across the pier. Their sparks ripped through the night like a blade through black fabric and bloomed into magnificent explosions of red, purple, pink, and blue.
My mouth hung ajar. My eyes glistened. The bottle slipped from my sleeve and the glass clinked as it rolled along the ground. Between thundering booms, I could hear people clapping and children screaming with laughter. Something inside me burned. The colors refracted. I was astonished—for a moment, I’m sure, my face must have looked young. Suddenly, I couldn’t help but sob.
When I woke up, the fireworks were over. The families were gone. It was a New Year. I kicked my bottle into the lake and walked home.
As winter petered out, I cut through Death Alley less and less, choosing to walk around the block instead. When my friends came back from holiday, I never spoke to G again. Most mornings, I just watched him through the grates on my windows. Waiting for him to ride that red bicycle.
Come Spring, G disappeared altogether, becoming just another midwestern ghost. Sometimes—when I see shattered glass littering the sidewalk, or when I bite into the stiff rubber of a Haribo gummy bear, or I cough up bile that tastes like cheap wine and pepperoni—I grip my forearms and think about G. I whisper to myself, “god forgives you.”
“The crowd was in turmoil. People were rushing to get out of the theater, cornered by locked doors and confused by the absence of exit signs... In a panic, people began jumping into the alley from above. Several people died from the fall, although some survived when their falls were broken by the bodies of people who fell before them.
The fire lasted 30 minutes, but took the lives of over 600 people. Most of the dead were outside on Couch Place, the bodies piled 6 feet high. When emergency responders began to salvage the bodies from the fire, the burned bodies from inside the theater were stacked in the alley before they were identified. Because of the tragic deaths and stacks of corpses, the Chicago Tribune recognized it as the “Alley of the Death and Mutilation.”
https://loopchicago.com/in-the-loop/couch-place-the-alley-of-the-death/
Do not move to a new city with a credit card. If you don’t get a job right away and you develop a substance abuse problem, you’ll burn through your savings, spend out your limit, and have the collection agency hunt you down. Ironically enough, I’m writing this essay on the couch of my friend who works for Discover. Collections still has not found me.
Okay, in writing this I stumbled upon a really silly question. If the date was 12/31/2021, is it NYE 2021 or NYE 2022? Grammatically speaking, the latter is correct. However, it seems many people (myself included) feel inclined to call it NYE 2021 since the year is still technically 2021. Not quite sure.
Having lots of sex and being thin in college has never looked so terrible. Thanks for killing my fomo
favourite piece by you F.D, so visceral I felt like I was there. Insanely good.