THE BIG CHILL, POP. 54

About a week back, an old friend contacted by via Facebook, and long ago we had a shared history through the looking glass, if the looking glass constituted purgatory. Last I knew, she had been in Louisiana, but she and her husband had moved up here to Oak Park a few months back. We set up a lunch date, as I can easily get to the suburb via the el, which at one point runs parallel to Main Street, which just now is being gentrified, but not by the hipsters in the city. Cobblestone streets. Actual diners. Dear, dead Harry, during one of our late Saturday night monsterfests, became quite the philosopher, and decided that a better name for the town was Innsmouth Heights.

Ileana is a woman that I was always fascinated with, and I considered her to be in the top five people I’d have wanted to run into before I die. (Two of the other four are Sully and Kurt Russell.) We ate breakfast at the Cozy Corner, because I’ll eat breakfast any time of the day. Then we spent the day walking the streets trying to not talk about how we met. The town of Bellair, in downstate Crawford County. Population 54 as of the summer of 1983. There were ten of us in all, most complete strangers, our only thing in common was that we all attended UIC. We were promised room and board if we wrote up anecdotes by the locals on VDTs in a bigger town named Casey. (I ended up with a side gig writing stories about pig slop for a farm supplement, was paid by check, and yet no one would cash a check in the hands of a hippie from Chicago. My having three hundred dollars in uncashed checks plays directly into my tale.)

There were manual typewriters in a general store, supposedly the first one built in southern Illinois, which made no sense, but when you consider the police chief rode around on a bicycle that had a banana seat. A few of us wrote our own articles, I wrote some poetry, and we all worked on fixing up the town, building foundations, helping the old folks who still called us hippies. When you can’t get out of a place that is three streets wide, you can multi-task for hours on end. The town reminded me of a place you’d see in Race With The Devil, that crazy film where Warren Oates and Peter Fonda outrace Satanists in a Winnebago. Well, the Satanists were on motorcycles.

Everything went south when the guy who kept us fed started sleeping with one of the UIC students and no longer bought food to stock the general store, although we got to the point when we could smell fresh meat on his breath. It was a horrifying experience, slowly starving as we waited on care packages from home. Most of us had taken a Trailways bus to Effingham, and been picked up in a van, as if we were new recruits into a cult. Ile and I, along with Bob McCoppin, found this to be an adventure. Aside from the starving part. There was a goat in town, we milked it but couldn’t bear to kill it. And how could we, by strangling it? We’d rather have strangled the idiot UIC professor who tricked us back to the town he had where he had grown up.

The nadir of our experience was the Night of the Hungry Dog. We had concocted a way to sneak over to the police chief’s home and take a can of dog food from their back stoop, figuring Bobo wouldn’t miss it. That was the dog. The chief’s wife once stood with me in front of their house and tried to inform me that some stars were brighter than others because they were closer to the sun. No, they wouldn’t miss the can of dog food. We waited until 2 AM, then scrambled down the street and back. Our mouths watering; we compared notes later.

And then we found that we had no can opener. The three of us used butter knives, ballpoint pens, even coat hangers twisted into a weird Buddha as the Grim Reaper shape. We were draped in sweat, the kitchen area–in fact the whole house–resembled one of those buildings on the Nevada Test Site after the bombings. Whomever had lived there previously had left an exercise bike next to the bathroom. Seriously. And at this point can you discount any part of this story?

An hour into it, we had a hole in the can and by then were able to widen it by sheer thought power. We then took turns dipping our fingers into the can, but none could get the luke warm paste to stick to our fingers, so we just used the damn Bic pens. Ink poisoning be damned. At least ink poisoning might add calories to our systems. We were gone from town soon after, but not before I found myself eating one bag of Saltines over a forty-eight hour period.

As we sat in the park last Monday, we likened our experience to that film The Big Chill, which hit the theaters a few months after we split Bellair. Because in years to come each of us knew we’d carry that common bond forever. Ile, me, Bob, Miles and the rest. I tried not to dwell on our talk, as I really did dig Ile, and I’ve patterned more than a few women in my stories after her. When I hear Bruce Springsteen sing “The River,” I think of her, because of the line about the girl being tan and wet from sweat down by the reservoir, even though there was no river or reservoir anywhere nearby. Just a pool of murky dioxin that bubbled whenever it rained. And, c’mon, who amongst us doesn’t hold lust in their heart for the opposite sex when it is the middle of a long, hot summer and you are hungry enough to eat charcoal?

On the way home, I got off the el at Lake and California to take photos of a ghost Budweiser sign and the Chicago Blow Pipe Co., but I had forgotten the time of day, and all the gang members were now awake. A story for another time.