Last night, a wonderful thing happened, and a terrible one didn’t. It’s my favorite kind of story, the one that sounds like a horror-movie script and turns into comedy, the kind that people would expect would go wrong but goes a completely other way. It happened because I have no common sense, so at 1AM when I feel like riding my bike in the city alone I go ahead and hop on my bike.
So I’m riding down the Lakeshore path for a while, alongside Lake Michigan and headed for the skyline, one of my favorite things to do. The skyline that is one of the most beautiful in the world, and at night when the Lakeshore path closes that’s when I go towards it. It closes for our safety, you see.
After a thirty minute bike ride I turn around, taking a different path, one I haven’t taken in a while. And as so often happens with me, I hit a weird dead end. Which isn’t so scary when you’re on your own, but when in that dead end are four men, speaking with raised voices and the silver glitter of beercans in their hands, then you get scared. By which I mean I got scared. It’s hard to be a female in our society and see four large drunk men at night and not feel scared. Hell, it’s hard to be a woman and not feel some sense of fear walking around alone, when women aren’t prevented but so few do.
My amber alert was on– I’d made some very real mistakes. Not only was I at a deadend where I’d have to get off my bike to go up a zig-zag ramp onto a higher level of the path to turn around, but the men knew it. The men knew I was lost, and they were yelling things at me that I couldn’t hear. So I did what I always do when I’m afraid of men: I talked back to them, in my voice that sounds fearless, and so I became less afraid.
“What are you saying?” I said.
They were asking if I was lost, and I admitted that I was (since it was obvious) with an air of confidence, suggesting that I wasn’t at a severe disadvantage. I hoped off my bike, and started walking up the zig-zag ramp thirty feet away from them. And that was when one of the voices grew nearer, and a large man approached me.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Hi, I’m not a weirdo.”
He was blocking my path, and I was on a ramp, so there was little I could do but stop.
“I was wondering if I could borrow your bike,” he said.
“Borrow my bike?”
“Yeah, just for a second. You see I’m from Ireland and I’ve never gotten to ride a bike in Chicago,” he said, and I did identify beyond the slurring an Irish accent. “You can take my beer as collateral,” he said.
Common sense is in my brain, even if I never give it much of a chance to manifest itself in my actions. It’s been ingrained in there against my will. I don’t like common sense because it’s generally the thing that tells me I can’t do the things I want to do, that they’re too dangerous, too unfeasible. It sets limits between people that I don’t like. And it definitely was telling me at that moment that I should not give my one form of escape to one of four drunken large male strangers.
So I do what I usually do when I don’t trust people: I trust them, and see what happens.
“I’m trusting you,” I said, looking him in the eye, took his beer, and handed him my bike. “Don’t prove me wrong.”
And as repayment, he introduced me to his friends.
“I’m Cein, that’s my travel buddy, and that’s just a security guard we bumped into and a random black guy. He’s cool, though.”
So Cein swerved around awkwardly on my bike as I talked to his friends (“It’s like riding my aunt’s bike!” he said, “Don’t you talk shit about Hercules,” was my response). The other Irishman was largely incoherent, though politely so, and the security guard quiet. The “random black dude” (who laughed when I mentioned he’d been introduced that way) had turned 47 two hours ago, and was curious and concerned as to what I was doing out this late all alone. He was from one of the projects, and was astonished when I said how far I’d biked and for no reason other than to stretch my legs.
“You gotta be careful, you know? This is Chicago, it’s dangerous,” he said.
“I know, I’ve lived here four years,” I said, a little prickly, since I’m defensive about people assuming I don’t know what I’m doing. My comment that I did this “all the time” didn’t seem to reassure him. The Irishmen and the security guard seemed completely complacent. They were making us laugh by doing various movie impressions, beginning with Trainspotting (“Scotland! Heroine! We’re not even wankers, we were just colonized by wankers! Fuck the English!”) and ending in an pristine performed American rap of an unknown artist (with many fucking of bitches, etc etc.) It seemed that the Irishmen barely knew the other men, and had basically befriended them just by giving them a few beers and had been hanging out ever since. I talked to them for a bit, returning every variation of “you should be careful” by the one guy with a joke, until he was laughing right back.
“Shit she’s probably a cop! Coming lookin’ like a helpless little girl and gonna throw us all in federal prison. You’re probably the FBI!”
“NSA,” I corrected, and thanked them for the entertainment, wished him a happy birthday, and headed home.
The experience wasn’t just a pleasant one– it’s one that got me thinking. Because if I were a native to Chicago, or a UChicago student with common (or UnCommon?) sense, that never would have happened. Likewise, if the Irish guys hadn’t been out-of-town travelers there’s no way that would’ve happened. The guy from the projects probably never would have approached me period, for fear of scaring the living bajeesus out of my helpless-little-whitegirl ass. Men in my neighborhood say hello to me during the day all the time, but hardly ever during the day for that reason. And even taking into account that they kept calling the guy “Chris Rock” to my Liberal-horror, that was some of the friendliest casual black-white interaction among strangers I’ve ever seen in this city. If I hadn’t been so oblivious to social norms, if the Irish guys had known that “this is Chicago,” it would have been just another bike ride alone, and any group of men I came across wouldn’t be individuals but just another thing to intimidate me, another shadow in the night.
I’m not saying if you’re a young woman you should bike through the city at night even if you’re afraid. I’m just saying that if you want to, don’t let your fears stop you. Because the fear is coming from a real place– it’s coming from living in a city whose rules you didn’t make, and us all collectively being victims of those old rules. But it’s no longer legislation enforcing those rules, it’s no longer Jim Crow, we’re no longer explicitly told not to leave our house without a man to protect us. Our fears now legitimize these rules we reinforce by living, of who can talk to who, and who can go where and when. The man I was talking to was far more afraid for me than I was for myself– the South Side’s stigma doesn’t just come from the outside in, it comes from the inside out.
Traveling has always taught me how to live at home. Because travelers, oblivious of the boundaries we set up in our native homes, cross them effortlessly, and get to because they’re outsiders. They’re forced to make friends not in one area or social group, but with whoever happens to be around. And since traveling to India I’ve lost my inhibitions about going through the neighborhoods of Chicago. I’m fully aware that my actions might have consequences. American cities are relatively dangerous places to be, and last night’s situation could have gone as bad as a situation with strangers can go. But spaces of safety are an illusion, and I will always remember that the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in was one in which authority figures told me I was safe, where I was in an environment of luxury, where I was in a room that for a few days was supposed to be mine.
So every time I go out alone at night I am testing a theory, and every night I come back I am proving it. I have made the decision to claim the city I love, to live as fearlessly as possible in a mundane way, to challenge my own common sense.
The toughest thing about living in Chicago is not getting tough.
this is real this is fiction 