I’ve always had a strange passion to go to the South Side of Chicago. Whenever I rode the El, I wondered what existed at the mystical 95th/Dan Ryan. And thus began my passion for South Side Chicago. And so, when the opportunity of riding the El to 95th/Dan Ryan came from my editor, I jumped at it. Though I had long conjured the mystical images of the South Side in my head, I had never visited and was dying to go.
I plopped onto a stained window seat when the train came to the Purple Line Noyes stop one Saturday afternoon, ready for my trip out of the suburbs. And after transferring to the Red Line, I was ready to sit back and take in the magic that is the Chicago public transit system.
I looked around. The car smelled like beef, and the man dressed in all denim next to me was sitting uncomfortably close. Eminem blasted out of the earbuds of a guy 10 feet away, and the woman behind me coughed in my hair.
At Addison, intoxicated Cubs fans swarmed the train in souvenir rain ponchos. The inebriated man nearest to me attempted to hit on an equally drunk girl across the car for several stops but then became preoccupied by a verbal dispute with the man he kept falling on.
When the majority of the Cubbers had left, around Grand, a visual path was cleared to a man sitting kitty-corner to myself, clutching a bottle of corn syrup and meditating in his seat.
It took me three stops of staring at the corn syrup man to pry my attention away, wherein I realized the car had cleared out just as we began to leave downtown, headed for the South Side. I gripped my seat in anticipation.
We rode through a couple rough areas containing strip malls with all-night liquor stores, where litter lined the highway and graffiti adorned nearly every building - but it was nothing I hadn’t seen before.
When we finally reached 95th/Dan Ryan, I stepped out of the train with excitement: This was where I had been waiting to be my entire life – my destiny, if you will. But as I stood on the platform, I inhaled and looked around for a hint of anything exciting and different – almost like Dorothy when she lands in Oz. However, to my horror, all I saw was a Burlington Coat Factory seemingly connected to a Best Buy in the distance. This was certainly not the place I had dreamed about.
As another train rolled up to take me back to Evanston, I walked on somberly at the lack of adventure and amazement. A man boarded my car surrounded by three police officers. I held out a little hope they were arresting him on some sort of charge, but soon it was shattered when they patted him on the back and exchanged stories about their children.
I rode in the otherwise empty car listening to the four men, whose conversation had transgressed into a debate of Chicago politics, for a little while.
The first looked up, noticing my less-than-shrewd eavesdropping, and said, “Man, this is Chicago: can’t expect anything more than it is. And it can’t be anything more than you make of it.”
