Lockdown Day 6; Saturday 28th March, 2020

Lakeshore Drive hustled Lincoln Park twenty floors below, late-evening traffic clogging the highway from the Old Fashioned grandeur of the Drake hotel to the malt liquor melee of the Addison turnoff. Lake Michigan sparkled in slow evening light, the twinkling rays of the retreating sun fading across that silver salver as the converging darkness gathered on Gold Coast streetcorners, alleycat boulevards and shadowy parkland. As ever, the night was alive with romancing couples and suspicious minds, weary footsoldiers returning from the fray, cartoon crowds of gangbangers, Lowriders, Westsiders, runners, cyclists and inline skaters labouring up the lakeside trail, a pony tourist trap trotting down to the Mag Mile, fully laden ladies struggling home from Oak Street boutiques, big yellow taxis cruising slow and mean past the Paradise parking lot, just another dollar, just another day for all of them. While above it all, the hospital beaconed neon promise through the gathering Chicago darkness, health and vitality, life and redemption, comfort in death.  

  The nurse announced her presence sharply by click-clicking her wicked witch heels.Not wanting to interrupt, I quietly watched her complete her readings. Vaguely South American beneath a jaded façade, she smiled a sweet pampas smile even as she surveyed the sudden warzone disapprovingly. My road gear lay strewn all around the room, dust-encrusted once-black leather bike jacket sitting grittily on the chair by the window, helmet lolling at the foot of the bed splattered with fresh blood and guts from the flying hosts of the freeway. Crusty boots clambering over each other in a truckstop fandango of oil and sweat and miles fast-travelled, tripping on the hastily over-stuffed rucksack in the corner topped by damp gauntlets still dripping guiltily onto the neatly buffed floor.

  We ignored her as she fretted around the reverential machines. I slipped the iridescent sunglasses off my forehead as Terry propped himself up against the smothering pillows. As his frail figure sunk into their soft embrace, an unwelcome shiver tingled visibly down my spine.

  “Don’t do that!” he barked.

  “What?”

  “The cold shiver thing. Don’t do it. I need cheering up. I need distraction. I need your awful sense of humour. I need bad jokes not some sad bloke. Not your regrets. Not your grief. And certainly not your pity.

  This is my curtain call. I have my own pain to deal with here. I’m not the first person you’ve seen die. You know the score. If I say dance I expect you to put on a Stetson, polish your snakeskin boots and do a hoedown to cheer me up.”  

  “I’m sorry T. I know. I know. Bit of a shock, that’s all. It’ll take a bit of time to, to …”
I was lost for words.

  “OK, so maybe no dancing. But come on, talk to me. Give me some of the juicy stuff, the Who’s Who of Trick’s little Book of the Dead. Put some meat on the bones, give me the blood and guts.”

 “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nothing else you’d rather discuss? End of Empire? Anarchy in the UK? Will Pink Floyd ever reform?

  No?

  Cubs rule, Sox suck?”

  “No. Not now. I’ll grant you Wrigley field is a better ballpark but I’ll stick with the White Sox.
You know, it’s weird, but despite the onrushing darkness, I have loads of time to fill. I need to keep my mind occupied. I need to avoid dwelling on this, going over that blind summit, that imminent unmapped highway ahead. Go on. You’re driving. Talk to me. Take me on a detour. Where are we going next?”

  I was deeply, deeply uneasy about this. Not about any implications of candid disclosure or sounding like a tit – this was Terry after all, he’d seen me candidly make a tit of myself many times – not even about the implied stark openness so far-removed from my usual internalising self. But about re-opening old wounds never treated with more than a field dressing, re-acquaintance with fledgling loss, foetal pain and fatal memories covered with nothing but a bandaid, stuff I’d buried for literally decades.

I fidgeted, looking to buy myself some time, stroked a long-lost crease in my crusty Levis, watched Terry rearrange his blankets in a slow waltz with dissipating comfort, before surrendering to the obligations of half a lifetime’s friendship and sighing, “Some stones are best left unturned Terry, but OK, I’ll go with it, though if you get bored don’t blame me. These people and places might be my world but they won’t mean diddly to you. And if they don’t come out as coherent stories as such, if I jump around, if they’re quirky or just plain daft, if they wander around a bit, get lost in acid flashbacks, seem pointless or self-indulgent, that’s not my fault, it’s just the way I remember it. This is real ME stuff and I’m not big in the opening-up department. If you drift in and out I’m just going to carry on with my story, so don’t blame me if you miss the punchline. And there’ll be a pop quiz afterwards so you better pay attention, especially to the B sides. No tripping off to cloud nine and leaving me rhapsodising while you dream sweet opiate dreams.

  So.
How do we do this? I can’t judge these people. That wouldn’t be right.  I can’t rank them or effectively gauge their influence on me, and you’re right, I don’t think I can rightly sum up what each meant to me, what I learned from them, not properly. I’m the wrong person to do that, too close to the raw. So … Let’s just take them as they come. What I’ll do is just pull out some tasty morsels to keep us going, some tidbits to get the juices flowing and have you begging for more. A blast from my past as a feast for the beast. It won’t be in any order beyond the order things come to mind. An unscripted morality play of one man’s mortality. It might get a bit messy but when was anything in my life not messy? 

  And you know what? You always did wonder why I spent so much time on the road. Maybe after this you can tell me.

So here we go. Trick’s Book of the Dead”