I was born at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago in June of 1989, the first of three children. My parents were still struggling at the time, my mother finishing law school at the University of Chicago and my father beginning a career that would eventually make him a pharmaceutical sales executive.
We were what I would describe as a typical family, my little sister being born two and a half years after myself. Nothing out of the ordinary, certainly nothing that would foreshadow what was to come. I remember block parties on our street (which out of eight houses included three firefighters, two policemen, and the water commissioner). The other kids in the neighborhood and myself would often venture towards the more dangerous parts of town close to our relatively safe street like some approached haunted houses in the movies we watched. The only difference was that instead of “I dare you to knock on the door” our games involved crack vials and bullet casings; myself usually being the one to accept the dare, even at such a young age stupidly romanticizing the projects near my home and the suffering that went on inside there that I was too young to really understand.
I didn’t have any connotation for it except that it was something beyond me, that suffering begot wisdom, and that I wanted to be seen as wise.
I remember how plastic slides at the park between our neighborhood and Cabrini Green would squeak, burning into little black girls legs and causing them to scream a high-pitched attention hungry scream at their young braided mothers who were too busy to care. The way that the older (or at least older than me at the time) girls’ jump ropes would beat syncopated rhythms into the sidewalk as they played Double Dutch after school every afternoon. And the way that all this was so intriguing to me, likely because it was so removed from my life, yet right around the corner.
I remember watching from my bedroom window as my father and uncle built a sunroom onto the side of the house my parents bought not long after I was born, pretending to sleep every time my mother would come up because she heard me giggling, and eventually, as I wasn’t fooling anyone, she told me to go down and ask them if they needed help.
It was more likely than not these memories that even today give me the feeling that I’m finally home every time I drive into Chicago on I-94 late at night.
I attended Catholic schools for the first two years of my education, and got nicknamed “big-brain”. Partly because of the large glasses my mother had bought me, but mostly because I had the uncanny ability to make my teachers believe I was way ahead of the class when really I had no idea what we’d done last week. The heavy theology and many of my teachers though were more than enough to turn me off to the idea of organized religion. I would often ask questions that got me in trouble, and I’ll say this much and no more on the subject: most of the rumors one hears about Catholic education are true. This was a long time before I told my parents I wanted no part of their church, but the notion was always in the back of my head.
Since those days I have lived in Copenhagen San Juan Osaka, Pheonix, upstate New York, and finally Columbus Ohio. I’m an ex heroin and cocaine addict, a musician, and a writer. Read some of my stuff, tell me what you think.
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