When We Were Poor
A walk down Milwaukee Ave in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood takes me to the door of the Flat Iron Bar. It’s warm so the windows are thrown open and as I sit down at the front bar the smell of cigarettes blows in, lingers and touches down just below my nostrils. As with all moments of deep nostalgia, it’s smell that revs up the mind’s engine for a road trip down the long highway of memory. The smell of fresh smoke and whiskey stained old wooden floors sets me off towards that most delicate time of life — that time when we were poor. When, because we had to scrape together everything, nothing was predetermined let alone guaranteed. How delicious and beautiful it all was.
I remember we’d wake up, open a window and listen to the sounds of the street and Bob Dylan. They played like the soundtrack to life itself. Then there was coffee — the shitty kind that tasted like rubber but that packed a punch. Morning cocaine. And then there was the scrolling through of vague and partially retained moments from the night before. Together we’d try to piece together the puzzle. There were always old and new friends. Degenerates and artists and people who talked around some distant idea called “making it.”
Inevitably there’d be a few goal oriented folks, maybe even somebody already on their way out — towards a career and stability and high class booze and thick steaks. Death, we might have said at the time. Though perhaps life-on-hold would have been a more apt description. Nevertheless, their presence always hung there like some sort of pre-funeral for the soon to be forgotten. It was a transition we all feared while at the same time understood its inevitability. Everybody’s got to grow up we’d suppose. But those nights we had no time to engage with such thoughts. Indeed we’d drink them away with the strongest liquor we could afford, for there’s no time to fear the future when you can barely afford the next day.
For old times sake I ask the bartender for a Chicago handshake — a shot of Mallort and a PBR. I can barely get the Mallort down without a gag. My tastes aren’t suited for it anymore. It’s a fucking shame. But, I manage nevertheless and what follows is a generous pour of bitter paradise down my throat. It enters and stays there like an old friend and at that moment I seriously wonder if there’s any pleasure greater than the taste of cold, cheap beer on a warm city night. I conclude there isn’t. And it’s this fact that pulls on those strings of sorrow deep within me and plays them without any sort of delicacy. What is it that I’ve been chasing so senselessly if not this? This pleasure, this feeling — what used to be my life, if only for a few years.
I down the rest of the beer and ante up again. “One for that guy too,” I say, as I tip the new can in his direction. His nod is suspicious. He’s not convinced I belong here. This is a place for regulars. Outcasts. Henry Miller types. Those who’ve fully committed to life’s pleasures and who understand that solidarity is the path to more. There’s nothing individualistic about this crowd. When you’re poor you’re bound by some natural force. A pack animal. Deeply human. Those who search for the spoils are the sick ones and their disease follows them. A stink of shame. The man knows this. He can smell me. I’ve turned my back on him, all of them. Only a fool with money thinks a free beer reinstates him as a member of society.
I understand and as I sink deeper into my sorrow, I let my mind wander back to our apartment. It was worn but wore its scars with deep pride. There was a constant yellow about it. The walls from decades of exposure to cigarette smoke. The floors from the light that fell off the hundreds of little bulbs strung across the ceiling, connected by cheap green wire cover. It was a place of magic. It was there where we’d gather with the rest of bar folk who weren’t done by two or four A.M. After the city shut down, our apartment was the place where life carried on. Where the hissing sound of opening cans wove together with slurred speaches and passionate advances. That space between night and morning, where the true nature of humanity has nowhere left to hide, was always my favorite. Two hours to peek behind the scenes of the movies we play for ourselves and others. Real life. As real as it ever got.
We’d fight through our fatigue and be the last two standing, so that we could fall, triumphantly, in bed together. When it came to sex, we made love with deranged passion. Like serial killers. There was nothing careful about it. Nothing to be spared. Though we had nothing of material we exchanged our souls and that was everything. Our bodies were the only possession we could give away in abundance and we gave them up freely. I gave you all of me and you did the same. Every last fucking breath we had we poured into each other. And we’d go again and again until we were so spent we’d just lay there and wait for the sun to come up. Yes, it was when we were poor that we gave the most.
And now, now we have everything we used to want. We have so much. And because there’s nothing to worry about we start making up shit. I worry that you’re faking your orgasms, you worry I’m cheating. It gets pathetic really quick. The giving is so distant.
When you have money you begin to understand two very deep truths about it — that, given some unfortunate turn, it might go away and that secretly, from the bottom of your heart, you hope that it does. If only we were strong enough to admit it to each other. Instead, we soldier on. We accumulate more and more as the hope that we lose it all grows ever larger. We long to be poor again. To be alive. To be us, one last time.
Now we spend our days wandering around each other with this constant, nagging feeling like we’re doing something wrong. When we had nothing we’d talk about a time when we’d have money and success and how we’d be able to do all the things we loved but more. The truth is that we stopped doing them with the people who were important to us. That we had nothing in common with these new circles. It’s true that when you rise, you rise alone. And so, we formed a new group. A group of others who also rose alone. We all pretend to love the life we have although, deep down, we harbor resentment for every person across from us because they, in such a profound way, reflect back at us the worst decision we ever made.
And they do the same with us.
The conversations now are empty, the words steeped in malice, covered with the perfume of flowery corporate language that sounds good but means nothing. An attuned ear would hear it as a cry for help but, unfortunately, we’re all muted by the sound of our own misery. When you have something, your primary concern is not losing what you have. All others be damned. The collective spirit we once held has been rotted by individual possession of things that have come to define us but have no meaning. And soon enough, we too had no meaning.
I finish my drink and as I slide it back towards the bartender, a tear drops unexpectedly onto the wood. The bartender wipes it away quickly, places another can in front of me. “From the gentlemen,” he says. The man gives me a nod. He understands. It’s not that misery loves company, like we’re conditioned to think. It’s that, in good company, there is no misery. I smile back at him, take the whole thing down and order another pair. Fuck it, I think, let’s make a night out of it. It’ll be like when we were poor.
