You think when you're at the L station about that experiment where they planted the world's best violinist in a subway somewhere, on a train, in an alcove; the details are fuzzy, but it was somewhere where street musicians sit, and nobody bothered to stop and listen to him.

How much did he make? Eight dollars? How much is this guy making? He's sitting out in the open, out from under the alcove so the pigeons won't hit him. He's got a trumpet and a boombox and he's playing harmony along with Miles Davis as the marquee above him scrolls and scrolls ERROR, ERROR, ERROR…

At times you can't tell the difference between his tone and Miles' tone and he hasn't opened his eyes in minutes and
minutes, even when someone tosses change in his case and it makes a noise, echoing around the station like it does, as if someone had collared a lion with a bird-friendly collar and the lion had pounced.

He just keeps playing. He smells like sweat and grease and the train's coming in ERROR minutes and even so, even though nobody's going anywhere anytime soon, nobody's listening.

Nobody, that is, except the crazy people, and admittedly, there's a lot of them. But they're invisible to everyone except each other, and you, because you're watching, even though you don't show it. And because you are, so, maybe, is everyone else. That girl in all black except for her red torn fishnets and her electric hair, with her iPod half out of her ears. Maybe she's watching, maybe she's listening. Maybe her music's off. Her eyes are half-lidded and look, purposefully, drugged, and she wears a look that screams cool, but just because someone looks like they're listening to screaming death metal doesn't mean they are.

How can you, anyway? A tiny woman in a ragged brown headscarf is screaming that someone has lost her life. She's walking up to everyone in line: "Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?!" as they keep their eyes straight and step back behind the yellow line lest she attempt to throw them onto the third rail. "Was it YOU?!"

The trumpeter keeps playing and he has by doing so exempted himself from the interrogation, but that's really all he's gotten out of it. And you judge him like this because you don't know. Maybe he goes home and counts his eight dollars and smiles because he's a millionaire, or a participant in a social study, or both. Or maybe he did steal the tiny woman in the ragged brown headscarf's life, and he's become a marvelous trumpeter to hide it.

She'd never know. She doesn't ask. Eventually, when she's run out of everyone standing in the station except the trumpeter, she stumbles down into the stairwell and starts muttering, plotting.

When the train comes the conductor's head pokes out the front like a cuckoo clock, watching his charges flow like milk down the piss-covered stairs out into the street, and up the piss-covered stairs into the piss-covered train. And they're all smiling, too, except for the goths, who are happily looking sullen. The sun has come out, or come out as much as it can through the haze, and even the haze is slowly dissipating over the lake, which, from this station, you can see just a tiny blue square of through the buildings. All of this makes up for how disgusting everything is, and how bad everything smells, because even though you're not supposed to, you can crank open an emergency exit window and let the hot air flow in and swirl around the back of your neck, making you shiver and everyone else stare nervously at you.

The air coming in smells like hot dogs and pizza. It's what everyone assumes about Chicago because of the stories and stereotypes and it's true. What nobody bothers to make into a cliché is that it also smells like dead fish and the interior of baking hot cars. This is summer. In the winter it smells like metal and snow, but the extremes are set so far apart that when you're enmeshed in one you can't even envision the other. The closest you get is inside an ice cream parlour and they've got the A/C cranked as far down as it'll go, and you, in your shorts and your tissue paper that you call a top, or maybe not even a top at all, you sit there licking your cone and shivering, clacking your ankles under the table, and it hurts, it's so cold it hurts. And even though ten minutes ago you were sweating your way down the block, practically swimming in the trail you left, watching kids shoot each other with water guns from highrises and wishing you would drop dead so that you might have some relief, what with the blood cooling effects of death and all, you can't remember what it feels like to be too hot.
Until you step outside, and for the first five burning seconds you feel like nothing has ever felt better than that rush of hot, mildly decay-scented air. And then five minutes later, you can't remember what it feels like to shiver.

That's Chicago. Right now the dog beach is too disgusting to be believed, because the alewive have washed down the St Lawrence Seaway or wherever it is that they come from, and died. They're saltwater fish and somehow they end up in Lake Michigan, dead, and wash up right in Chicago. No tourism brochure will mention that one. You picture dogs and dead fish, and frisbees and tennis balls and the confusion that will so inevitably happen, and wait another stop, for the beach with what seems like hundreds of volleyball nets. A blanket of them, made from bouncing ponytails.

The beach is stinking strong but the water's filled with children, children who are too young to be grossed out by anything but old enough to stand past the dead fish line, which hovers somewhere around 5-12 feet out. Their parents shield their eyes and their minds with visors and sunglasses, safe on their beach spreads. Children have been swimming in the putrid water for decades and no one's been sick yet, but it's still difficult to watch, the brightly colored bathing suits stumbling and the chubby limbs lashing out, over and over, pushing and flailing the floating fish out of the way as they make their way deeper.

The backdrop is gray, gray, gray; the sky, the sun the strongest it's been in weeks and still struggling through a gray haze, the buildings silver, but what is silver but a shiny polished gray? Here the dirt sprouts up through the grass, not the other way around, brought to light by bikers too lazy to follow the curves of the path. They bounce and shudder over weeds, and behind them the gray flashes of cars on Lake Shore Drive throw reflections over their faces, their smiles as they look around them and think, what a bike path. What other city has this, a snake of a commuter highway, wide and tree-lined, winding around downtown and the other side fading away into the lake? What other city has this, the sound of the traffic swallowed up by the screams of volleyball and basketball players sweating with the lake on one side and fifty story buildings rising on the other?

People can ride their bikes to work along the side of an expressway, hear only the water, and arrive at work smiling. What other city has this?

You can feel it, even through the gray, the people smiling. There's a man with a hot dog cart, 89 cents per hot dog, and he's got a line of people stretching three deep all the way out to the end of the parking lot. He laughs, really belly-laughs, at things people say to him as he fixes their hot dogs, even if nothing's that funny. He's probably a little bit crazy. His belly shakes on his flimsy little stool and the whole line holds their breath for the crack, but it never comes. People sit down in line right on the hot asphalt, and jump up shrieking. Their bathing suit bottoms have melted so far they're practically translucent.