Chicago

We finally found the perfect place to park for a few days while we explored Chicago when Lasky locked the keys in the truck.  He looked like he wanted to cry.  I knew he was upset enough so I just called him a mindless gorilla and went off by myself, leaving him to think about what he had done and wait for AAA.

I stopped into one of the countless little bars that surround Wrigley.  I was drinking a beer and thumbing through an Isaac Asimov essay about population densities in U.S. cities, enjoying myself thoroughly, as usual, until someone started talking to me.  The guy next to me, ignoring the fact that I was reading, as people can always be relied upon to do, asked me how I was doing.  I said not bad.  He asked me if I had heard about the perfect game.  I said no.  He segued immediately into a story about his cousin who had just died, whom he claimed had once been the tallest woman in America.  Morons find me wherever I go.                  

I got back to the truck a few hours later and Lasky was sitting on the ground still waiting for AAA.  He didn’t look like he was having a very good time but I gave him my patented “you reap what you sow” look, and he knew better than to say a word. 

He had talked to a comedian he knew from LA who lived in Chicago and was performing that night.  He told her we would check out her show and get drinks after.  He told me she was cute and talented.  I assumed she would be neither. 

The show was in the backroom of a bar.  The other comedians were average but girl we were there to see turned out to be good.  She talked about rappers who rhyme the same word with itself and how it upsets her.  It upsets me too, so she was preaching to the converted.  She then fell into a character called Homonym-C who rapped in this flawed way.  It could have been terrible, but it wasn’t.  She did it in a clever way and the crowd loved it.  I saw Lasky smiling, bobbing his head to rap.  I knew he had no idea what a homonym was and I wasn’t about to tell him.  He had had a tough enough day, so I did the right thing at let him continue to believe he was enjoying himself.

We ended up staying at her place that night.  I slept on her couch and her cat slept on my head.  I was thinking about the drive through Indiana.  It occurred to me that if we replaced all of the corn that grows in this country with broccoli, we’d be just about cancer free.  But what did I care?  Cancer doesn’t run in my family and I had cat hair in my mouth.  Lasky was on other couch snoring like an idiot.  We were leaving Chicago the next day.