John Pavlus

We Chicagoans, like all city-dwellers, crave constant conversation--audible, mental, musical, physical--anything, really, just to have something to discern or ignore.

My chatter of choice is the printed kind; I used to dread venturing outside my apartment without something to read. But if I were caught out without some scrap of printed matter, I'd default to that most effortlessly empowering of urban diversions: eavesdropping. Just think: A jillion channels of real-time reality programming, instantly accessible, for free, anywhere/anytime. Hell, it sure beats Wi-Fi.

Trouble is, this cocked-ear content stream gets old fast. Talking (especially on cell phones) is literal, and literal is boring--so if I bother at all anymore, it's not with my ears. Instead, I walk and I look, because really eavesdropping Chicago isn't as much about the people and their noise as it is about the things--their traces--that don't talk, but somehow tell all of our city's private stories.

Once you open your eyes, you can see them everywhere.

I start putting one together while riding the Brown Line to Kimball on Saturday afternoon. I'm sitting in the good seats, the ones that face parallel to the doors. The train hisses up to the Fullerton platform, and as I watch the students disembark, I notice that the sheet-metal divider between my seat and the doorway is dotted with a crescent-shaped pattern of deep needle-nosed dents. The damage looks like a bite mark from some impossible animal, or as if someone stabbed the chrome surface over and over again with a letter opener. I try to imagine a simpler explanation, but for the next four stops, I can't get either of them--the passenger or the animal--out of my head.

Whatever happened here, it's already a hell of a lot more interesting than whatever the Accenture execs across from me are mumbling about, because those conversations--and all the other jillions--aren't the point. What we really want are the stories they imply--and if filling in the blanks is the best part about eavesdropping, then I prefer my stories seen and not heard:

Every tree along a four-block stretch of 18th Street has the first four feet of its trunk painted white.

Nestled into a rivet-studded nook atop the Metra overpass at Fullerton and Keystone is a giant stuffed "Tweety Bird" toy.

Early Thursday morning on 18th Street: Monsoon season hit hard last night. I pad through the puddles toward the newspaper streetboxes at the bus stop across from my building. On the sidewalk between a bench and the Sun-Times streetbox, sitting upright and inverted like a tiny wrecked teepee, is a damp white umbrella. A dingy gray filigree rims the tattered spoke-edges. It reminds me of a tutu. It looks like a little girl's thing. There are old men sitting on the bench together, but they don't look at it. I notice it there, later, when I go out for dinner: slumped in front of the streetbox, which still contains, I can see, a tall stack of newspapers.

(2003-08-05)

Also by John Pavlus

Buggin' out
Perhaps the Debates' storied history--thirties-style carny barkers, heckling hordes, and orators with names like "One-Armed Charlie"--set expectations too high
(2003-07-30)

Dating game
Could the heyday of syndicated reality-dating shows be waning? If the turnout for "Elimidate"'s open casting call at Bar Chicago is any indication, connoisseurs of sexual schadenfreude may soon have to get their fix elsewhere.
(2003-05-28)

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