Snapshots: the el

A sunny afternoon with time to kill in Logan Square, a very mixed district of north-western Chicago. The elevated railway (”el”) runs very close the apartment I found (somewhat indirectly) through the Hospitality Club.

Every five or ten minutes (thankfully less often at night) a blue line train roars past. I’m staying not far from an incline that takes the elevated track from eight metres above ground to eight metres below ground. As if the roar of a steel train running on steel wheels along steel tracks on a steel elevated structure were not enough to keep you awake at night, the additional noise created by the braking of descending trains and the acceleration of ascending trains surely is.

The ascent from subterranean to above ground running marks the end of the branch to O’Hare, the newest in the city. From this point on the train runs along an elevated structure, parallel to Milwaukee Avnue, built in 1895. That’s what a quick bit of research revealed. This noisy structure is one of the oldest I will see on my trip to America.

And to think that when I originally walked this alleyway, it was the authentic-yet-retro logo of the Chicago Transit Authority that caught my eye.

Three dollars

“What’ll it be folks?”

The question comes so hard and so fast we are both lost, gazing blankly around the bar like a pair of rabbits in the headlights. We’re in a small town bar - a small town red neck bar, to be precise, somewhere in the mid-West. We have just arrived, unpacked our bags in a motel room, and are in search of refreshment.

“Two Bud Lights,” says my guide.

“Two Bud Lights it is…” replies the barman. He’s dressed in noticeably hip clothes - a big statement t-shirt and a light coloured linen jacket. He looks almost as out of place as we do.

“Bud Light?” I ask my guide.

“It’s the only thing I can be sure they would have,” she replies.

A glass and a half of pale beer arrive before us.

“This one is for you, and the barrel popped as I poured it, so this one is on the house.”

We thank our hipster barman, and drink to a day on the smaller roads of the remoter counties of this state. We drove through this town earlier in the day, and then doubled back in a loop knowing that this would be a good place to stay overnight. There was a pair of motels to price off against each other, a couple of places to eat and this - the small town’s self evident and ram shackle low end saloon. It faced the main street of town with a covered deck and countless neon signs in the window. The door was propped open, and the cool evening air was slowly making its way inside.

I am lost in the middle America I love. I don’t want to find my way again any time soon. Anonymous and modestly making my way, there is no more comfortable place to be right now than sitting at this bar.

The advantage of being a Brit in America is not only that everything seems cheaper, the beer also seems weaker. Your pound and your liver go much further over here. Another pair of drinks follow, this time in bottles from a more respectable local brewery. It’s a myth of European origin that Americans don’t make good beer - they just don’t export good beer. Hence slanderous judgements of American culture are made based solely on Budweiser and Coors.

I am strangely content, yet an undercurrent of imminent sadness undermines these cold beers. This time tomorrow I will be at an airport, and on my home. Another journey is over. It’s time to return to the little windswept island in the north-east Atlantic that I call home.

Looking around the bar we clock the clientèle. A pair of (underage) kids keeping a low profile playing pool at the back of the bar. A pair of elderly weekenders who seem to have chosen the wrong bar for a quiet evening’s drink. And finally a rowdy gang of construction workers; still wearing reflective jackets and sporting tightly shaved heads. They occupy the indeterminate zone around the end of the bar where the counter top lifts up. One (young) man in particular is in charge of this drunken conversation; he floats between his buddies and the open counter, straying behind the bar to establish a comfortable position within the barman’s territory.

Hipster barman seems not to mind. He’s dutifully pouring drink after drink. Guessing that construction workers start early and finish early, I reckon they’ve been here for almost two hours. The subtle intra-personal politics of American alpha males is observed discretely by my guide and I. Tensions occasionally flare, and we both prepare ourselves without communicating it for some kind of tussle. They subside, naturally. More drinks are poured. We order food. A frozen pizza emerges from the domestic freezer behind the bar and disappears into a pizza oven.

As we begin to eat, alpha male number one comes over to join us. Perhaps he’s distracted by my admittedly beautiful female guide. Or maybe he’s seen my poser spectacles and wants to know who’s the cheese eating surrender monkey who’s just arrived in town.

He introduces himself, and we shake hands. He inquires as to our origins - which interest him. One of us from west of here, one of us is from east of here. We are all roughly the same age - he’s almost a year younger than me. He’s been to Europe once - a brief layover at Frankfurt airport between military transport flights.

This young American road worker is delighted to welcome us. He’s interested to speak to me, the visiting Brit. He’s met many British people before; he’s served alongside them in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost a year younger than me, and he’s seen four tours of duty in the U.S. Army. He shakes my hand again, and tells me that my soldiers are some of the best in the world, the most professional out there.

On the last night of my latest American odyssey, I found myself somewhere I wanted to be for some time. In the middle of almost nowhere; small town America. One horse town, one red neck bar. I’ve found myself in my “dream” middle American venue. But what now seems to have been so arrogant - to have imagined that I, the rich British tourist, could have just swanned in here for a quiet drink while I soak up the atmosphere - seems to have been based on the assumption that I wouldn’t have to have a conversation like this.

The young American man is drunk. He’s slurring, the actions of his hands and arms are wildly exaggerated. And he apologises. He doesn’t stop apologising. My guide and fellow traveller knows the military terms; she’s the daughter of a man who fought for this country in a certain sixteen-year conflict. She also knows other references he’s making, other frustrations with post-demob liasons that he’s occasionally expressing, but then hurredly concealing and apologising for. He’s a long way from home, working with an itinerant road crew earning top blue collar wages. But he’s left his beautiful wife and daughters at home. He carries pictures of them in a laminated wallet, and drinks away the evenings (”most nights after work”). He talks to us about them, but more about his life to date. Especially that brief visit to Europe when he transited in Frankfurt. Delighted to be in Germany, he and his buddies celebrated the stop off on their journey home by buying a crate of German beer to take on the plane. It being a civilian flight, however, they’re told the glass bottles can’t go on board, so they collectively neck about five bottles each.

“Man, I didn’t know German beer was that strong.”

This is a clichéd situation. A well spoken privately educated Brit with a BBC voice and a BBC take on the world arrives in a small town and starts talking to the demobbed and apprarently deeply traumatised young working class American. I’m drinking beer and making jokes about American brewing, and he’s drinking glass after glass of strong liquor telling anyone who’ll listen what he hasn’t been able to tell anyone from military liason.

The conversation last longer than the sum of its parts. I order two more beers while my guide talks with him, reminding him to keep pressing certain people for certain things. She has a greater degree of empathy than I do. I’m lost, floating out of my depth not quite sure this conversation is real. Everything I believe about certain events and actions is being confirmed, but I’m not capable of looking at this man in the eye. And I know in the pit of my stomach that in hundreds, maybe thousands, of bars across this country tonight, men and women like him are telling strangers their story. Maybe no-one else will listen, because it certainly sounds as though the authorities who sent him to a war zone four times in a row won’t listen any more. He’s left the military, set down his uniform and now, he has discovered, lost the vital framework in which his comrades supported him. Hundreds of miles from home, his new buddies are short-contract colleagues and tourists who happen to wander in to the bars he frequents every night after work.

When he leaves us to re-join his buddies and set off for the night, we shake hands again repeatedly. He tells me it’s been an honour to talk to me tonight. I return the compliment, and make some sincere but rushed and half-considered gesture of a compliment that could only be accepted without complaint by a very drunk man.

He finishes his drink, and the group of road workers heads out for the night.

My American friend and I are silent. Of all the places in the world, another dimly lit bar in a small town is not where that man should be every night. We both know it, but can’t express let alone consider where to begin. The support this young man needs is not here. It could be at home, but he needs to feed his family before he can show his face in their company.

Hipster barman clears the end of the bar of the empty glasses, and sweeps up the small change and dollar bills left as a tip. He mutters and rejoins us, dropping less than $3 in change on the bar in front of us.

“Jesus. Three hours of them in here and what do they leave? Three fucking dollars.”

Chicago Pride

On a second floor balcony, looking out over heaving flower boxes of red flowers, I watch through a torrential rainstorm as a man in a dress dances on the flat lead roof of a commercial building. It’s the annual pride parade in Chicago, and I’m on my fourth or fifth Mimosa, wondering why we call that beverage a Buck’s Fizz back home in Britain.

I had been down on the street a little earlier, just before this downpour, standing on a kink of Broadway watching the parade go past. Naturally I’m a little ashamed not to have stuck it out, but firstly there were more mimosa’s to drink back inside and secondly I’m not the most obvious person to be at a gay pride parade. However I did try to get into the spirit as alternate floats of social groups, political representatives and commercial enterprises chugged by to varying volumes of cheers. Barack Obama wasn’t in attendance, undoubtedly aware of the bad press being at such a liberal event might have on his appeal to the necessary wavering conservative voters of America. But his Chicago campaign team were there, handing out stickers and enjoying an electric wave of support from the crowd. The importance of a rainbow sticker with ‘Obama Pride’ on it was somewhat undermined when the next float came by, and I was handed a similar rainbow sticker promoting a wholefood supermarket. Every self respecting major corporation in Chicago appeared to be out for pride, forcing smiles and proudly showing off its non-heterosexual employees, as well as its commercial appeal to valuable consumers who wield the pink dollar.

An hour or two later, and the parade was finished. We had an appointment to make up town so we made our excuses and stepped out in the sunshine that had followed the run. The mid-morning to early-afternoon parade had left a wake of debris in its path, and city employees were already out and about attempting to clean the streets of litter, paper cups and beer cans. The normal ban on public consumption of alcohol is lifted (or perhaps ignored) for the duration of the parade, and the apparently repressed drinkers of Chicago were delighted to embrace the opportunity for al fresco drinking.

America often seems to be a repressed nation to me. As I mentioned before in the promo for the (as yet unfinished … but I’m working on it) eigth episode of the podcast, Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family said at their Birmingham gig that “we’re American… we’re more comfortable with violence than sex.” Chicago saw more than four hundred murders last year, and by the end of my recent visit to the city I was still no less comfortable at the common sight of police officers or even security guards carrying handguns.

As I pegged it north along Broadway, making us more late than ever by stopping for photographs, I considered the importance of Chicago Pride relative to other such events around the world. The last gay pride event I saw was in Montréal in 2006. Admittedly this one was more blatantly American than the multi-lingual event of cosmopolitan Montréal. During the parade we’d seen line dancing cow boys strut past, and hoardes of roaring Harley Davidsons piloted by gay bikers. What better vindication of the gay pride movement than the connection between liberation of sexuality and the ultimate symbol of freedom of movement? Perhaps most admirable, though, were the young black teenage boys who boldly strutted their stuff in the brightest of cross dressing attire. This was, after all, a predominantly white parade in a city that is anything but.

Those sights stuck with me the most. I felt lucky to have witnessed a slice of Chicago Pride’s parade, because in such a masculine country as America it felt so much more vital and liberating to see the bastions of male culture being subverted and ultimately enhanced by the contribution of a homosexual community. In other words, I had no idea there were lesbian biker chicks in America, or even (line dancing) gay farmers. But my respect for American culture and society grows every time I see the stereotypes of modern America challenged and reshaped like that.

The Crown Vics of Chicago

Nothing comforts me with the knowledge that I’m heading home than the fruity burble of a British black taxi’s diesel engine. It can be cold, dark, wet and my night could have gone badly, but heaving open that big wide door (wide enough for a whilechair) and sinking into a springy seat, with acres of legroom, is the perfect come-down before heading home. The steep hills of Sheffield and the aggressive gear changes of that city’s cabbies produce a tuneful melody I recognise inside and out. I.e. I can recognise it both from inside the warm cab and from outside, normally as one steams past me on those nights I decided to climb the hill home myself.

In the United States, the black cab’s distant brother is the bright yellow “Crown Vic”. And if you have a late night out in any North American metropolis, nine times you hail a cab out of ten, it’ll be a Ford Crown Victoria. And like the black cab, the Crown Vic has a distinct engine note that resonates with many fond memories of good nights out in Canada and America.

These two public carriages have very little in common. In fact the only thing I could suggest, other than ubiquity as taxis, is the vague origin of their engines. Even then, their similarity is only defined by distant parenthood.

Ford don’t make the British black taxi - a company called Manganese Bronze Holdings in Coventry do - but until recently they did supply the engines to many of them. The majority of new shape black cabs are propelled by a 135hp 2.4 litre Ford diesel engine. It’s a hard working and pretty efficient engine (also found in many Ford and LDV vans) and being a diesel it has plenty of low-rev torque for propelling cabs full of drunken students up steep Sheffield hills.

The Crown Vic, meanwhile, makes do with a much more American solution. A 200hp 4.6 litre petrol V8. An engine that is almost twice the size of the black cab’s motor, and which devours petrol at a prodigious rate of about 15 US mpg around town (for angry Brits who think that’s shocking, bear in mind that US gallons are smaller than the imperial gallons we use, so that works out at about 18 mpg in our units… although that’s still pretty appalling). As Americans struggle with petrol at more than $4.00 per US gallon, Chicagoan cabbies have now been permitted to start adding a $1 fuel surcharge to their fares.

The Crown Vic isn’t available for private purchase any more - only bulk sales, primarily of custom built taxi-cabs and police cruisers are available. A small number of hire companies still offer them, but civilian models like the one above are rare. That’s because the Crown Vic is painfully old - it’s one of the last cars available in America today that is still built with a separate body to its chassis (most passenger cars, if not 4×4s, are of monocoque construction). And the Crown Vic’s platform was first introduced in 1978, with a body that has seen only evolutionary design changes since 1992.

This is an old car; an old beast of a Yank Tank that’s almost three metres long and two metres wide. In profile it is a souvenir of a terrible era in American car design, when three boxes made a sedan shape and some chrome was slapped around the edges to create a car. What’s infuriating about the Crown Vic is that for a vehicle of such vast proptions, it’s claustrophobically small inside. Four people can sit across the back bench, but they’ll have their knees up around their eyes because of the miniscule floor well.

And yet, despite all this, its a car that still sells by the trailer load. Being essentially medieval in design and production terms, it costs less than $25,000 (£12,500) to buy one - much less with fleet discounts. Their longevity and the ease with which they can be serviced makes them appealing to cab drivers, and trigger happy American cops (who use their cars for more aggressive shunt stops) like the way that a body-on-frame car can be easily bent back in shape after pushing miscreants onto the hard shoulder. The special edition produced for Police Departments feature numerous additional safety and performance features to make them go faster and stop quicker. They also get a nice little badge on the trunk lid that replaces the words “Crown Victoria” with the more obvious “Police Interceptor”.

Amusingly, plain clothes cops also love them. Seen above is your basic police cruiser (with the upgraded engine, shock absorbers, wheels etc) but devoid of markings, presumably so that cops think that they can blend in to the crowd Nice idea. But since no-one other than police officers and cabbies drive brand new Crown Vics any more, they do stand out quite a lot. Especially when you see them with two men sitting in the front seat, and with low profile red and blue lights in the back window. Especially also when the double digit IQ managers of police fleets in Chicago forget to remove the “Police Interceptor” badge from the trunk lid.

Snapshot: bikes on public transport

America is perhaps one of worst examples of a developed nation when it comes to public transportation. Intercity trains are slow and offer limited service, and few cities offer anything approaching a reliable and intergated system of buses, trams and trains in line with most major European centres.

However, when summer comes to Chicago (and many many other North American cities) public buses such as this one are fitted with front mounted bicycle racks. These racks fold up against the front of the bus when not in use. When the rack is lowered, two bikes can easily and quickly be loaded and locked into position by passengers. So although the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is painfully underfunded and under constant threat of service cutbacks, Chicagoans can combine bicycle and bus to get around their vast metropolis.

Britain can’t even manage to have a consistent approach to letting passengers carry bicycles on trains - how is it we’ve been outsmarted by America with such a simple addition to public transport? British readers - please feel free to forward this post to your local bus company and let me know their response.

Addendum: in case the picture confuses you, it looks like I pressed the shutter just as the destination board was scrolling. I believe that it reads alternately “56 MILWAUKEE” (the route) and “to Jefferson Blue Line” (the destination).