Chapter One

Chapter 1

Positively Chase Avenue

1993–1997



In the early 1990s, years before I became a father, I lived in a neighborhood called Rogers Park, on the far North Side of Chicago. The neighborhood held a dozen blocks north to south that were lined with wide, shady trees. Thick-grained Lake Michigan beaches made up its eastern border. But despite its natural advantages, Rogers Park wasn’t one of the fancier parts of Chicago at the time. We didn’t get the upscale retro diners, loft condos, or bars that catered to Indiana University graduates who seemed to spread throughout the city as if hatched from pods. Instead, the streets of Rogers Park dripped of mild neglect. This made them interesting but not particularly dangerous.

The apartment buildings in my neighborhood looked a little ragged, but you often heard guitars playing from inside them as you walked. No major trend had touched the neighborhood in decades; the people who lived there deliberately defied trendiness. The nightlife tried but failed. Hip-hop DJs, start-up rock bands, and small independent film societies ran up against the same frustrations. No one in the neighborhood could afford to go out, unless they could, and then they went out in other neighborhoods. My cohabitants were poets and drunks, low-end shop owners and itinerant musicians, union organizers and shifty-eyed permanent graduate students who slept on the floor. At the time, I described the people of Rogers Park as the sediment left over after you put the city of Chicago through a sifter. It was a neighborhood for people who didn’t belon