Three major events rolled into one weekend in Chi-town. First time hanging out in Chi. Me and my girl LaTia did the gritty street outreach all day, meeting folk from all over the country. So many broken people in this world! At all the straight events we ran into so many vacationing groups of black women from all over, smaller cities like Saginaw, Michigan, or Louisville, Kentucky, all saying, when hearing about our work at GPRC and my book, how “my son … or “my nephew had this problem, or got into this, yes, and just needs somebody to help….” etc. There is such a big need all across the country. Made some new friends.

Chicago in the summertime is a great place to hang out. Never realized how aqua-blue Lake Michigan was– thought it would be dull green lake water.

Since it was also Pride weekend and I have some male friends in Chicago, I went out to the GREEN DOLPHIN with them 1 a.m. which had at least as many straight dudes and women as otherwise, the way I like it — mixed and cool. It’s a grown folks place. Hadn’t been to a club, let alone a house music club (down south they don’t even know what house music is) in what, 13 years or so?

It was cool– straight and non-straight all hanging out, dancing to tribally-spun music by a very good dj. I’d forgotten all about house music … .thumping dance music being a hot sweaty late-into-the-night Chicago or NYC thing.

Remember that song — “RIDE ON TIME,” by Black Box? Lol.. that song and the way the dj’s used to pound those beats so hard into the wooden walls of the old dance clubs in NYC in the very early 90s… literally rattle your bones turning your body to sloshing liquid making you helpless to the crescendoing, bursting rhythm and bass and beats.

So anyway, I met this dude; sexy, fit, nice yellow-caramel skin, with these sleepy Dominican-looking eyes. He’d been at Jimi’s birthday party earlier, and we started talking. At the Green Dolphin, I asked him what he did — what was the j-o-b. He said: “i can show you better than tell you,” and took my hand and pressed something up into my palm– It was a police badge!

That was such a weird thing. One moment he is talking into my neck, giving me little involuntary shivers, the next i suddenly felt like he had pulled back and was about to hit me. Of course that wasn’t the case, he was still up close and personal, with a nice smile, but the whole dynamic had changed. Like Lahumba in Ghetto Plainsman says, “Cops can and will do to you whatever they want to.” Of course I don’t automatically feel the same way I used to about cops back in my more “ignant” days, I am even friendly with two police officers, but still, say, just for hypothetical, all I could think was, what if we were dating?

If we got into a fight, would he then plant something on me and arrest me? It was weird talking to an equal and suddenly in the next second that whoosh inside knowing that at any moment he could pull crushing power over me.

Of course like I said I do know two other cops now, peripherally, but …

Oh well. So much for that. Even so, I hung out with “R” the last night I was there and we walked along the concrete shore of Lake Michigan. He said the Lake doesn’t have waves like the ocean. He says it’s just like a big bowl and slops and sloshes water from one end to the other. In the winter, it is so windy and cold it freezes spray way up on the concrete walls. He also says he knows some apartment buildings on the South Side that tie ropes from the front door to the curb so people have something to hold onto and not get blown down trying to get to their cars.

Other Chi impressions: I stayed at an old, slightly renovated single-room-occupancy hotel down in Chinatown, a few blocks from the El. There was a Chinese Walgreens, a couple of Chicago cottonwood trees growing out of the broken pavement (ever notice that cottonwoods in different parts of America’s former prairies all look a little different?) (don’t forget Chicago used to be Illinois tallgrass prairie). Also, I’ve always wondered: Why do Chinese folks love American country western music? They play it in so many stores, intermingled with what I guess is their “country music” from rural China, which is very different sounding and warm, and like clear, liquefied resin. I like THEIR country music, if that is what it is. (But sorry, I hate country western music.)

Oh, rem how everybody for a moment a couple years back was saying “sup” or “bye” by doing the fist bump, rather than dapping or shaking hands? Well I guess it originated in Chi, because everybody still does it. Guess that’s why Michelle did it to Barack when they won the primary. You remember– and how all the right wing trolls shrieked and called it “the terrorist fist bump.” It’s just a Chi thing