Valentine's Day let down

You’d think there’d be at least something marking the spot were seven men were brutally gunned down in cold blood, but as my roommate and I strolled past the lot that used to be 2122 N. Clark St., there was nothing but a fence, row of trees and patches of grass.

On Valentine’s Day in 1929 a handful of Al Capone’s boys walked into the building that once stood there dressed as cops to bust up a rival gang members whiskey deal, asked them to line up against the wall innocently then proceeded to Tommy Gun them all to pieces. One of the most brutal gangland shootings of its time and even to date, it was dubbed the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Seventy-six years later, on a mild, blustery pre-Halloween Fall, the type of night where I feel compelled to seek out something macabre, the roomie and I stewed around the apartment restlessly trying to think of something cheap and mildly entertaining to take up the next couple of hours. I suggested we stop by the site where the murders took place not knowing anything about what stands there today but mildly curious about it.

We walked the 1.5-mile trek down Fullerton, to Clark, then south past Webster and passed a newly-built (i.e., after 1930 — this is a really old part of Chicago) retirement home. There’s a series of mid-rise apartments across the street and I’m imagining to myself what it is the people who lived there in the winter of 1929 thought when they heard a 30-second long machine gun from across the street that morning.

“Hmmm, just another day in a really fucked-up, corrupt, violent city,” they probably thought to themselves briefly and went back to their radio shows.

I’m utterly fascinated by history and wish to re-live it every day. Time travel, for me, would be the ultimate.

Well, on the even side of the street, like I said, there’s a old folks home and as we walk along notice that the first vintage building on the block is 2120 (it’s a non-descript 9-5 business), which meant that the empty lot just to the north must’ve been where the shit went down. So we stop and look at it expecting to gain some sort of interesting perspective (at least I was) but we don’t really. There’s no memorial denoting what took place there over 75 years ago. The lot is fenced off completely so there’s not getting access to it unless you’re a member or employee of the home.

We just stood there, leaning up against the fence.

My roommate says something along the lines of “hmmm, quite a few dudes died tragically ten feet in front of us.”

“Yeah they did. Pretty crazy.”

“Well, you ready to go,” he asked after about a minute.

I stood there for another moment as he headed down the street holding out hope that I’d hear the yelping of a dog or the faint rattle of gunfire (stuff some people have said they’ve experienced while passing the site.) None of this happens, of course. Shit like that never happens to me. The only time something completely inexplicable has ever happened to me was one time a block of cheese slid off the counter of a girl I was dating in Omaha at the time and flew halfway across her kitchen floor. Not quite as cool as walking past the site of one of the bloodiest gang murders in history and hearing the ghostly bark of the poor dog that was trapped in the building after the killings, but I’ll take what I can get.

A couple approached me from the north as I was leaning into the fence gazing at the empty lot, and assuming they knew the story behind the location I figured they probably thought I was some lame tourist or a paranormal freak. So I backed away and headed south past Clark Bar nonchalantly.

On Da Bandwagon (fuck it)

I’ve never been a bandwagon jumper with sports teams, having always pretty much stuck to my guns since birth: The Iowa Hawkeyes for anything college, the Oakland Raiders in the NFL and St. Louis Cardinals for pro baseball.

Over the years, of course, my concern over the success of the Raiders and Cardinals has waned, as I pay much less attention to sports as I did when I was 12 (except for the Hawks, though — I’m still an insecure pubescent goon when it comes to them.) The Cardinals are solid (still alive in the playoffs, I think) but I don’t give two turds about baseball anymore. I used to worship the Raiders as a child, but these days they’re arguably one of the worst franchises in professional sports and show little signs of building upon that reputation.

So I’m in Chicago now and I start to notice this nifty little undefeated Bears team they got — the one that plays nasty defense like the fabled ’85 squad did, the one that’s finally found a way to put points on the board — and I’m thinking to myself that perhaps it’s time to make a change.

And you know what? Fuck it — I don’t feel the least bit guilty. There’s a lot to like about these guys. Coach Lovie Smith seems like a reasonable guy. The stout defense, and practically the entire team for that matter (filled with only a couple recognizable stars) perfectly personifies the blue-collar, 'it ain't all about me' spirit of this town. Quarterback Rex Grossman (finally healthy after four years) looks like he has more fun out there throwing the ball around than an eight-year-old at a Pop Warner game.

This is my kind of team.

I didn’t have tickets or anything, of course (they’re hard enough to get when they suck), and I’d slept through the pregame tailgating with a massive hangover, but I figured I’d go down the Soldier Field as Sunday’s game against the Buffalo Bills was ending to get a glimpse of what the hoopla of this 4-0 start was all about.

Basically every preconceived notion I had of what being around a Bears game would be like came to fruition. There were fat men in Brian Urlacher and Walter Payton jerseys raving about Da Bears in their South Side accents, and there were fat women in jerseys raving right with them. The scent of spilled beer and steaming brats was omnipresent. The entire crowd (with the exception of the scant Bills fans, who by the looks on their faces have already pretty much given up on this season) was in the state of bliss that only an intense football fan can be in when his/her team is off to an impressive 5-0 start and is quite3 possibly the team to beat on the way to the Super Bowl.

There was a moment which I stood up on the cub of the sidewalk to take in a glance of the panoramic view: the McCormick Place parking lot filled with tailgaters directly in front of me, Soldier Field’s Roman-like stone façade beyond it, a tranquil, sky blue Lake Michigan to my right, the bustling traffic of Lake Shore Drive to my left and the breathtaking Sears Tower-dominated skyline overlooking it all like a proud parent.

I felt the entire city was looking down on at me during that moment, smiling, patting me on the shoulder and saying, “This is why you moved here, Jeremy. Welcome.”

As I was heading back up north to catch the train a young guy (who appeared lethally intoxicated) looked over at me from across the street and pumped his fists in the air triumphantly. I pumped mine back as he began jogging across the street towards me keeping his right hand up in high five mode.

“I ain’t gonna leave ya hanging, buddy,” he hollered as he weaved in and out of traffic.

“Fucking five-and oh, man! Fucking five-and-oh!” He declared as our hands met in mid-air.

“We’re going all the way this year,” I reply, subconsciously referring to them as we.

At that moment my Bears fandom had taken on tangible form. I grinned.