Continuing Chaos in Chicago

And so, with a house still smelling of packed cardboard boxes, a set of couches still undelivered, photos and sconces still to be hung, and a yard growing wildly out of control, we left for Chicago for ten days.

It was the sort of trip, much like our honeymoon, where we made sure to plan every microsecond, leaving Orlando at 6:25 AM (which, of course, means that we had to leave our house to drive to the airport before 5:00 AM (which, of course, means that Heather had to wake up at 3 or 4:00 AM to do her “get ready” thing)) so that we could get to Chicago’s Midway Airport, hop on the el and rumble into the city (all of our bags taking up an extra seat on the super-tight car, earning us dirty looks from the veteran Chicagoans around us), climb off the el onto a three-story-tall wooden framework boarding/de-boarding gate which might or might not have been under construction, right there in the middle of “The Loop,” the busy financial district of downtown Chicago, where we tried like hell to keep track of our bags, lugging them through turnstiles, around corners, hanging onto them so that they wouldn’t fall onto the el tracks or onto the crowded streets three stories below. We lugged them down a long and twisting flight of stairs, my laptop case, her laptop case, my suitcase, hers, my garment bag, her carry-on, and her purse, all those seasoned city slickers passing around us as we struggled and sweat, shaking their heads at the two “country come to town” tourists who were now standing directly under the giant “Chicago Theatre” sign in the middle of one of the loudest, busiest, fastest paced, and powerful cities not only in the United States but the entire world, and we clutched our luggage as the businessman passed, as the homeless people even looked at us like we were clueless. And where to go from there?

Already we were exhausted, overwhelmed. Already I was in the Central Time Zone, unsure when to begin the Diet Coke binge I had planned for so long, so that I could become reacquainted with an old friend.

We waited under the Chicago Theatre sign for my cousin Diana, who works downtown, and we shared a cab ride across the Chicago River to our hotel, the Inn of Chicago, on the Magnificent Mile, and (bingo!) directly across the street from a 7-Eleven. Whatever confidence the city had stolen from me as it welcomed me, it now returned.

“Can I?” I asked Heather while we checked our bags with the hotel.

“A Diet Coke? Please, Nathan. It’s too early.”

It was still 9:00 AM, I think. Maybe 10.

“Come on!”

“It’ll be there when we get back.”

"You're sure?"

"Am I sure, what?"

"You're sure it's going to be there?"

"We're in a hurry, Nathan."

Okay, so yes, we were. We’d arrived early because we had tickets to the Cubs game with Diana, so I gave up…Wrigley was more important than a Diet Coke, and I’d have one at the game, right? And so it was go, go, go, down Michigan Avenue to catch the bus to take us to the North Side to Wrigley, but first a quick stop in Walgreen’s so I could get some cash back for the bus ride because apparently in big cities, cash is still important for such things, but I had to buy something with my debit card for the cash back, so (bingo! I win!) a bottled Diet Coke (boo! Not a first choice, but I had to take what I could get), then onto the bus, where I tried to hand the driver my money and he sighed and told me to insert it into a machine at the front, and I scratched my head and apologized and complied. And then to an underground subway, and then to Wicker Park, where we met up with Diana’s friend, and then a taxi ride to Wrigley, where (bingo!) there was a 7-Eleven right across the street from the stadium! The bottled Diet Coke taste was still sitting heavy in my mouth…I needed something fountainy. And here was a 7-Eleven. My grandmother, greatest Cubs fan ever, was taking care of me from her place in heaven.

“Not enough time,” Heather said, noticing the gleam in my eye. “We need to get lunch.”

And so we followed Diana to Goose Island, a restaurant and Chicago brewery where—let’s be honest--who drinks soda?, so it was beers all around, and then to Murphy’s Bleachers, where (come on, let’s be honest, etc.) beers all around, and then into the game itself, where I’d pledged to eat a gigantic Ballpark hotdog and drink a Diet Coke, but it was hot in my seat, but not Florida hot, not humid, so I could have sat there all day, and I did, I guess, drinking Old Style and sort of watching the Cubs play one of their worst games of the year, but who cared? There was a singing beerman who brought the beer straight to you, and in order to get a soda, I would have actually had to walk to the concession stand. Oh, well. Five Old Styles. Six. Who knows? And then out of the stadium! Down the road in a massive wave of Cubs fans to…to…oh, hell, who was keeping track, but it was late afternoon and we were already drunk and so there were more beers all around. And then…somehow…a place called Flounder’s with killer tater tots, and more beers. And where was Diet Coke in my life, then? Nowhere, nowhere.

And if I’d hoped to fall back into some sort of schedule while in Chicago, it wasn’t happening. We fell asleep early that night (if it was even night yet), then woke early the next morning (Friday) to begin our Chicago themes of (a) Walking, and (b) Eating Poorly. Day two, and it was go go go. The Chicago Architecture Cruise, Navy Pier, the Ferris Wheel, lunch at Diosa’s on the River where (yes!) I could finally sit alongside the Chicago River and enjoy a Diet Coke…but…it was a tiny operation, this place, more like a street-meat barbecue stand than a complete restaurant, and so I had to settle for a can. A can! (boo) And then wine on the terrace of our hotel, however many stories above ground, where you can hear dozens of distinct sirens all at once blaring from so many different directions, then dinner at Pegasus Restaurant in Greek Town, where (let’s be honest), the martinis and the beer and the flaming cheese and the hummus and the gyros sort of outweigh the desire for Diet Coke. And, oh, there was no schedule, and my stomach was already feeling it, and I’d been randomly patching together Diet Coke experiences as I bounced around town, but this wasn’t the addiction I was used to. It felt like I was grasping to keep it alive.

And then it was Saturday, and Heather needed to shop the Mile, and yeah, I finally got myself a 44-ouncer from the 7-Eleven across the street from our hotel--

--but Super Big Gulps are always a bad idea when you’re shopping because you always have to place them somewhere inappropriate as you pick things up, and then you have to use the bathroom while you’re in someplace classy, like Tiffany’s or the Coach store, and you look like a giant goober because you’re the guy with a 7-Eleven cup asking the meticulously dressed Louis Vuitton salesperson where the pisser is at, and he gives you a look like, “We’re Louis Vuitton. We don’t have ‘pissers.’ In fact, we are all mannequins, and thus, do not ever need to use the bathroom at all.”

Then lunch at Potbelly’s, and cans of soda once again! Cans! Then on to “Wicked” at the Ford Theater for some Broadway in Chicago, and aww heck, why would I buy an over-priced beer when I’m watching a Wizard of Oz musical? So I buy a Diet Coke from the bartender. But, alas, there is a problem! Of course, of course!

“You can’t drink this in the seats,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“You have to drink it out here. In the hallway.”

“Um.”

“However. You can certainly purchase a souvenir cup with lid, and then we allow you to take your drink back to your seat.”

“I see.”

(And this is the story of how I spent five dollars on a 20-ounce Diet Coke, and why I now have a “Wicked” souvenir cup in my pantry back home.)

Then check-out at the hotel, cab ride across town to the intersection of Wrigleyville and Boy’s Town, where we stayed with our old friend (and groomsmen in our wedding) Ira, then dinner at a noisy, noisy North Side Italian joint, margaritas in some sort of Mexican basement that only accepted cash, then a 5K in the wee hours of the next morning, starting near Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park, through the Museum Campus, around Soldier Field, and back down Lake Shore Drive to get our less-than-impressive times and places. Then purple Gatorade, but no Diet Coke, and a long walk across Chicago to grab a cab to take us all the way back to Ira’s place, where we showered, dressed, and walked through a sputtering rainstorm and a Gay Pride Parade (which could receive an entirely different blog to itself), where Heather and I clearly stood out as the only straight people in streets filled with every imaginable manifestation of gay pride one can conjure.

Then…finally…finally…a cab ride to Avis Rental cars back in the Loop, where I controlled a mid-size vehicle, and could stop any damn place I liked, any place I knew there to be Diet Coke.

Relegated only to walking and to cab rides and to public transportation, Diet Coke addiction is an enterprise of limited resources, limited availability. When you’ve got a car, you’ve got control. This is why vacations are always so nerve-wracking for me. If, by chance, you visit a city that is populated plentifully with 7-Elevens and other acceptable convenience stores (as Chicago certainly is…hell, 7-Eleven is a major sponsor of the hated White Sox), you are still constrained by where you can walk, and (as I’ve discussed in my blog before, when we visited Memphis) whether or not you can convince others to go with you where you need to go. With a rental car, you have control. With my rental car, there in Chicago, I suddenly had control!

For four days, as we drove out to Lisle in the suburbs, I could stop anywhere I chose! Suddenly, my addiction seemed back on track, my schedule seemed to right itself, life seemed to be reassuming normalcy. We still ate horribly: bratwursts on the grill at my uncle’s house, deep-dish pizza at Lou Malnatti’s and solid scoops of cookie dough in Naperville, ice cream on the Fox River in St. Charles, Trolley Dogs in Kenosha, Wisconsin, beers at Walter Payton’s Roundhouse in Aurora, beers at Emmitt’s Brewhouse in Downer’s Grove, even a daytrip to Milwaukee to enjoy some beers at the Cold Street Brewery and the Miller Brewery. But through it all: a rental car, and absolute control to stop at whatever convenience mart I deemed worthy. Diet Coke out of the fountain. Diet Coke in Milwaukee, Diet Coke on the Riverwalk in Batavia! Yes, life had slowed and I had caught up with it.

But only for those few short days.

Then it was back to downtown Chicago, back to the Loop, back to the rental car return site, and back to walking. Walking, walking, walking, everywhere. Walking from the Avis site, with bags, about a mile to the Congress Hotel on Grant Park, where we’d stay through the 4^th of July and the Taste of Chicago. Walking to the museums, the Shedd Aquarium (where you can only drink your Diet Coke in the food court, perhaps so that nobody feeds it to the sea otters) and the Field Museum (free admission for educators!), walking through the Taste festival and eating the same delicious and horrible-for-us food that Chicago had in great supply: gyros, and chicken and waffles, and pierogies, and potstickers, and catfish sloppy joe, and beer battered artichokes. And, of course, since the sodas again cost as much as the beers, I decided to drink beer at the festival as I walked, waiting for the 7-Elevens that always seemed to be a few blocks out of walking distance.

There were attempts to resume a healthy lifestyle. A job along the lake that lasted for a few minutes. A lot of walking, walking, walking. But too much of it included beer. I even drank at the aquarium.

Then: with Kanye West playing over loudspeakers throughout Grant Park, fireworks over Lake Michigan, a bottle of wine (for which I had to borrow a corkscrew)--

--and—through the windows of our bar at our hotel—a shooting, a mob of police officers tackling young men, and the straight line approach of the SWAT team. Yes! Vintage Chicago! That's the kind of stuff you don't get to see on the tours!

And finally, in order to get more cash for cab rides and el fare and a thousand other big-city incidentals that keep presenting themselves, I found another 7-Eleven, four blocks from our hotel, purchased a Super Big Gulp for probably 50 cents more than it would cost back in Florida, got some cash back, and packed my bags and prepared to lug all of that luggage back up those rickety wooden stairs, through the turnstiles, onto the el, through over a mile of Midway concourses…back into my friend Jay’s trunk at Orlando International…back home to my new place…where hopefully I could resume a normal, healthy schedule once again.

The thing is, though, when you’ve started to experience a bit of chaos in your life, it never leaves of its own accord. My ten-day trip to Chicago had certainly been a new and interesting jolt to my system, a remarkable time, but the food was all still bubbling and turning around in my stomach, and the next weeks would come to feel not only like an extended hang-over, but would also present a new whirlwind of activity—some exciting, some depressing—that would continue to alter my life, and my Diet Coke addiction, irrevocably.

The Diet Coke Chronicles...Plunges into CHAOS!

My schedule’s been out of whack lately.

My entire life is dependent upon routine, upon not only a disciplined adherence to the things I need to do (wake, shower, work, go to gym, eat dinner, brush teeth) but also the things I enjoy doing (read, watch episode of Mad Men, play with dog), and Diet Coke has been for many years the mile marker by which I time my day. I hit 3:00 on Wednesday, and I know that I’m running out of gas, that it’s time to find the nearest gas station and fuel up. All of life seems to fall into place under such rules, and while some might argue that my life is—like a long stretch of rural highway—predictable because I so rigidly schedule myself, I would argue this: I don’t want to live in an action movie; I don’t want to be the star of Mission Impossible IV or the next Batman film. Bad things happen in exciting action movies. Villains emerge. Loved ones die. Dogs bite you. Buildings blow up and burn your skin. And if you’re an action hero, you get no rest, no time to stop in at 7-Eleven and grab a Super Big Gulp. It seems to be not only an exhausting lifestyle, but a very dry, thirsty one, too.

So…fine. I’m boring and predictable. Every night I go to sleep at about the same time. Every morning, I have a bowl of cereal. And every mid-morning, I crack and have a Diet Coke. I’m boring. I’m boring. But you know what? I’ve got no interest in fighting crime or supervillains or terrorist organizations anyway. Give me a comfortable routine in life, let me get a few things accomplished, scratch off a book from my reading list, a movie from my “must see” list, and let me knock out a few miles at the gym, enjoy my evenings, and call it a day.

Well. Such was my life until the end of May.

And then I had to go and buy a house. Wait, wait. Scratch that. I had to go and buy some old grandma’s house, a fine and well-kept structure (looks great on the outside, and it was a decent deal in the current housing market) whose insides—if left untouched—would quickly shrivel me and turn me into a soap-opera-watcher.

See, here’s the thing. Heather and I had been living in an apartment out in Winter Springs for the past two years, ever since we got married. There was a nice gym at the apartment, a pool, a small play area for our dog Barney, and an excellent proximity to two convenience stores (Hess, operated by the oddest and most frightening assortment of clerks imaginable, and my speak-easy 7-Eleven, operated by the most preppy and middle-class clerks imaginable); everything was fine, except that Barney sheds a pound of fur a day, and it would build and build in the carpet, and I was a sneezing, coughing wreck on a daily basis. Oh, and our upstairs neighbor was a scumbag who might or might not have been running both a drug cartel and a child prostitution ring (jury’s still out). So we figured: let’s get a house.

As soon as that decision was made, of course, I could already imagine my solid routine melting before my eyes. What I couldn’t imagine, though, was the physical toll that my body would suffer under perhaps the most frenzied two months of my life.

At the end of May, as soon as we signed the paperwork and closed on our three-bedroom place near Waterford, we spent a night at Lowe’s buying carts and carts of cleaning supplies and paint and tools to attempt to “de-grandma-fy” our new house. This was no easy task. The former owners had painted the walls a non-offensive crème color, sure, but they’d lived in the place for more than a decade, and not only had the furniture never really been moved (thus the paint was more lively in some areas, faded in others), but the walls were stained in spots from a decade of indoor cigarette smoking. White baseboards and doors had taken on a sickly yellow color. And it wasn’t a tough, masculine smell, either; it was as if Grandma had been smoking Kools (or whatever old people smoke, something that smells like both tobacco and arthritis). So we painted. And painted. We painted doors, we painted bathrooms. We painted the kitchen a bright red, and the living room a contemporary gray, the TV room a dark blue and the guest bedroom and bedroom both a relaxing Bungalow-esque green. We painted the baseboards a fresh coat of white. All Memorial Day weekend, from 8 AM to 2 AM, we painted. And another weekend after that. And another weekend. We ripped out the old smoke-smelling carpet and had dark wood flooring installed. We scrapped the old light switch and outlet covers (the plastic also stained yellow) and fastened on some sleek silver covers. By the end of June, though we were physically drained, the interior of the house had been completely converted.

(before)

(during)

(end of June)

There was only one problem. The hours of the day that I normally looked forward to, that I normally depended upon for my Diet Coke: all was different during May and June. Sometimes I managed to sneak out of the house at the prescribed hour, white paint on my face and in my hair, black paint all over my t-shirt, and drive to the local 7-Eleven for a drink…but more often that not, I drank my Diet Coke at the wrong times. Before bed, and then I couldn’t sleep. After dinner, so late in the day for a first soda that…well…why bother? And the 7-Eleven that I was now using felt different. I’ve chronicled in this blog once before the difficulty in finding a new convenience store to frequent, and this Waterford Lakes 7-Eleven felt so busy, so abused by commuters, that my business didn’t even feel appreciated.

More renovations. Furniture. Putting together a mammoth bookshelf, and additional bathroom cabinets. Forgetting my Diet Coke for a day. Forgetting the gym. Eating a bag of Doritos in a single sitting. Going to sleep with my stomach making strange gurgling noises.

Packing up an entire apartment and moving everything across town in a single day. What day was it now? Saturday? This is how I spend my weekends? Putting together a shelving unit…on a Monday afternoon? Wait. Monday? Or was it now Tuesday? And had I even drank a Diet Coke today?

Back when I was a consultant for my national fraternity, and I measured my long drives by the number of sodas consumed, regular “working hours” stopped holding meaning for me. I’d wake up early, drive all day, and then work until midnight. But even then, when I was in a different city every single day, I still managed to find the local gas stations and convenience stores that catered to my specific needs. I still managed to “excuse myself” from meetings in order to drive five miles away to the 7-Eleven that I’d seen when I exited the highway several hours prior. It didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing; I was not only regular in my drinking habits, but also gloriously excessive.

Recently, though, my constantly shifting and amorphous schedule led me to an interesting realization: I was missing days. There were stretches of two days, sometimes three, where I’d been so busy that I hadn’t even thought to drive out to the BP Connect to buy a Diet Coke. Other days, of course, I’d down four drinks in an afternoon.

One of the best parts of my sort of addiction is the ability to make it work for me the way I want it to; that’s why crack addicts and heroin addicts aren’t quite so efficient and lovable (there are also other reasons, I suppose, such as track marks and homelessness). And in the span of just a month, my life and my schedule had turned to chaos, and my addiction…well…it obviously hadn’t disappeared…but it, too, felt as if it had turned to chaos, as if it didn’t know what I was expecting of it anymore, as if it was confused about the strange twists and turns my life was suddenly taking.

“Just wait,” my wife and I kept telling one another throughout May and June, as we hung photos or opened boxes or assembled furniture, “in a few more weeks, everything will be back to normal.”

Normal. What an interesting word.

No, things would not go back to “normal.” Not anytime soon.

Because at the end of June, we left for a ten-day trip to Chicago, our first large-scale vacation since our honeymoon, our house still an incomplete disaster area, my head still dizzy, my stomach either growing or shrinking, but making weird noises nonetheless. Still no schedule for me to rely upon, and now I was traveling to a city under a different time zone, where I would have no car, where I was unsure how I would find convenience stores and—sometimes more importantly—public restrooms.

(to be continued)