finally, something weird happens

You know the Cowboy Junkies, right? A band I was chagrined to learn falls into the “adult contemporary” category, pegging me as old, sentimental, lazy, and maybe a little bit wanna-be for liking them. The past few nights, whenever I have had the misfortune of being outside, I keep hearing a line from one of their songs: “It's the kind of night that's so cold when you spit it freezes before it hits the ground.” I haven't actually done the experiment—the past few nights, when I've been outside, it's taken so much effort just to be, outside, that I've had no energy left over for spitting, and besides every time you move or change your posture you inevitably expose another part of your body to the cold. It's better not to try anything funny. Christopher lives in a house on a corner somewhere up where the cool things are in Chicago. Gabriel and I drove up there to pick him up for dinner yesterday,¹ and even though Gabe parked on that same corner, just the walk inside the gate and the minute-long wait while Chris came down to open the door and let us in was enough to keep me huddled in my coat as we sat around for fifteen minutes in his warm apartment saying our hellos and deciding what to eat. How else to describe this cold? Among the many ailments of my car, one is that it's sometimes impossible to open the driver's side door from the outside with the key. You have to walk around to the passenger's door and reach through. A couple of days ago I ended up having to climb in and twist myself into the driver's seat through the passenger's door: the driver's side lock was so frozen that I couldn't even get the button up until the car had warmed up on the inside. Granted, my car is like a vaudeville show on wheels, so it doesn't really prove anything one way or the other, but still: it's pretty cold.

The last stop of the evening, which followed a complicated car-switching maneuver that left Gabe and me car-less, was a little party in the university neighborhood at which people of all ages constantly asked us, and then reminded us of, how long we'd all been in this phd program. Somehow that and everything the three of us said seemed to contribute to the impression of irrational depravity that apparently is now the reputation of us senior type people. Of course I'd prefer not to have a reputation at all, but if I have to have one I suppose it doesn't get much better than irrational depravity. Around two in the morning, one of the hosts came around waving an empty wine bottle and announcing that everybody had to go to the living room for a game of spin the bottle.² A moment later, people started commenting how late it was getting and quietly putting their coats on. We depraved ones made our way out with Megan, who had offered to give Gabe, me, and another girl who lives in the neighborhood a ride home. I live within a seven minute walk of the party, but when she offered the second time I decided to spare myself the pain of the walk.

We dropped the other girl off first and then went down a dead end trying to get to my house. Hyde Park is 90% one way streets, and if it's not a one way street, it is probably a dead end, so driving from one house on 54^th street to another house on 54^th street can be quite complicated. A police car passed as we did this maneuver, which was probably where this story actually began. We pulled back out onto some non-dead-end streets and were driving along swimmingly towards my house when we were pulled over. I guess they'd followed us for long enough to find something they could stop us for: Megan's license plate registration was long expired. She has out of state plates and an out of state license, and she didn't have proof of insurance on her. The policeman took her license, disappeared for a while, and came back to say that because of some lack of arrangement between the Illinois and California governments which didn't allow him to deal with this situation by just writing a ticket, Megan would have to follow him to the police station “on 29^th street, you know where that is?” Of course none of us knew where the station was. What would happen once she was at the police station was that she'd be given a court date and be assigned a $2,000 bond, of which she would have to give $200 in bail.

Despite the number of movies we've all seen that involve these sorts of terms, we were all a little confused. “Well, see, you're technically, now, you're under arrest,” the policeman told her. Bail can only be posted in cash, we managed to find out, and there was no cash machine at the police station. “You got a cell phone? Start making some phone calls,” he said. To me it sounded like a line from a movie. We actually passed the Dunkin' Donuts with the ATM on our way to the police station, but we were following the police car and none of us knew where the station was, so we didn't want to stop. The police station turned out to be a little hut in a middle-of-nowhere area right near the Illinois Institute of Technology campus, which I am told is not really the nicest neighborhood in Chicago. The front room was split into an open office area where several people were milling about and a civilian area with a couple of pay phones and a couple of seats on which Gabe and I were instructed to sit while Megan first talked to someone across the desk in the open office area and then went to the detainee room, which she later described as split between a comfy chair area and a bench area with rings for handcuffs. Among the benches at least one, presumably, was the Group W bench, and I like to think that this was the one she sat on. We non-detained people weren't allowed in to take a look, though Megan kindly tried to arrange a tour for us.

The officer who had originally talked to us, and who came out now to fill out some paperwork, had been accompanied in his car by another officer. She came out of the detainees room just as Gabe and I were asking about bail money and said to him, “She can come out here, she doesn't have to stay in the room, she's not under arrest” in a voice of mild exasperation as he stood with a slight smile over his paperwork. There was some conversation among the people in the open office area about the where the nearest ATM was, and the consensus seemed to be a gas station a few blocks away. Neither Gabe nor I felt comfortable driving, at least not out of a police station—we'd both had a couple of drinks at the party, and wouldn't it be silly to get arrested for drunk driving while driving to get money to post bail for your friend who'd been arrested for lacking a sticker. I'm new to driving and Gabe is new to drinking, so we're not really the most useful people to have around in this kind of situation.

So Gabe and I walked out into the now even later, now even colder, part of this night that was already, hours ago, so cold that when you spote it frozes before it hit the ground. Gabe flips up the enormous, fuzzy-edged hood on the enormous down blanket that passes as his coat, so that all you can see of his face is a dark shadow: he's like a ring wraith with fashionable fur trim around his hood. I pull my hat down over my ears and my scarf up over my mouth so that the only thing that really hurts a lot is my nose. I cover my nose with the scarf occasionally to relieve the pain but then the glasses get fogged up from the breath being reflected back at them by the scarf and I can't see, so then I pull the scarf down again until the glasses clear up and the nose starts to hurt again. There is no angle at which it makes sense.

The gas station was a few minutes' walk away, but when we walked in there was a grill pulled out to block the ATM machine. It's out of order, explained the man behind the glass at the register, it's some sort of communications problem, is all. Gabe explained that we needed cash to bail a friend out of jail. This didn't seem to particularly endear us to anybody. The man did tell us that there was another ATM at the 7-11 down the street. It was difficult to imagine there being a 7-11, or anything else open all night but a gas station, anywhere for miles around: the area was all tall classroom buildings and a few things that looked like unfortunate married student housing, surrounded by lots of scary, dark open space. But we struck out in the direction that the man behind the glass had pointed at, even though it looked like a block full of nothing. “You know,” said Gabe helfpully as we huffed along,

“this isn't really the best area. I mean, it's really not such a good area.” For some reason I was feeling very cheery. In the car on the way to the station I'd been thinking about how late it was and how I've been going to sleep before eleven lately and how I was going to be completely exhausted the next morning, but somehow now that we were in this kind of absurd situation I was feeling all sprightly. There's something very satisfying about a clear, limited mission that is slightly and somewhat comically unpleasant. “I think we'll be fine,” I answered. “Who'd want to be out mugging people on a night like this?” After a few minutes Gabe said, “They'll be wondering where the hell we are. I wonder if they'll send out a cop car to look for us,” and we joked about that for a while.

We walked alongside a long, short building that seemed to stretch on forever. The first floor had full-length, full-breadth glass windows opening into large, open rooms with giant pointellist photographic designs on the walls like big Lichtenstein paintings, and the second floor was covered in some sort of very strange metallic glow--it was either reflecting a bright orange light from an unknown source or emitting it. The building took up a good part of the block, and it seemed to undulate as we walked, changing its distance from us. It was, in short, one cool building, and for good reason: upon further investigation it turns out that this clunkily named McCormick Tribune Campus Center was very unclunkily designed by one Rem Koolhaas. I'll give you some advice: next time you are wandering through a gang-ridden arctic tundra trying to find money to bail your friend out of jail, try to walk by a Rem Koolhaas building. It has a most soothing effect. In a very unlikely turn of events, the far end of the Campus Center turned out to house, of all things, a 24-hour 7-11 in which a very brave man was unpacking a box as we walked in and asked for the ATM. I took out two hundred dollars, counted it twice, thought back to what the woman in the police station had said—yes, she had said two hundred dollars (I wanted to make sure we would not have to make this trip again)—and we walked back out into the scratchy night air. “Boy, I am certainly fit to drive now,” Gabe commented. “I'm about the least drunk I've ever been.”

By the time we got back to the police station, I didn't even feel all that cold. Either I was numb or the quick walking had warmed me up. I handed over the two hundred dollars and we waited around while more paperwork was written up. The very zealous policeman who had originally stopped us had apparently written out a ticket for Megan's plates, her failure to have proof of insurance on her, and her invalid driver's license. Megan pulled out her California driver's license to show that it was valid, and a long conversation ensued among the five or so people behind the desk about whether or not a student is required to get the driver's license of the state where she studies. For a while nobody seemed to know an answer that was more convincing than anyone else's answer, and the woman sitting at the computer in the back, although clearly participating in the conversation, made no move toward anything like actually looking up the answer. Finally a police officer who looked like a man but sounded like a woman said decisively, “No, oh, well, if she's a student, and her residence is still there, then no, she doesn't have to get a new licence.” The woman at the desk, who was explaining the procedures to Megan, widened her eyes at the piece of paper in a kind of flash I recognized as what I do when I catch myself wanting roll my eyes but know that I oughtn't to. “Well, just take this citation into court along with the others and they'll just throw it out for having issued a wrong citation.³” The original police officer who had written the citation was not around, but it seemed pretty clear that the piece of paper stood in for him.

Finally Megan had been given all the paperwork and a court date, and we left to go home in her car. She reported that while we had been out battling the tundra for the cash, another police officer had walked into the office and, seeing Megan, asked what was going on. When the original officer who'd stopped us told her the story, she asked him where he'd sent us for money. Her reponse to the answer was, “You sent them there, in the middle of the night? That cash machine isn't working, anyway. What kind of car are they driving?” And, hearing the answer to that, “You sent them out on foot? In this neighborhood? Are you stupid?” And she'd gone back out to her cop car and, apparently, gone to look for us.

1I'm on the Psuedonym Randomizer here—uh, it sounds like kind of a Christian type name, let's think of another Christian type name...

2Any non-native adolescents in the audience? You sit around in a circle and the two people who end up at either end of the spun bottle have to kiss each other. Or so I've heard; I don't think I've ever actually played.

3It's sic, okay? So don't even say it.