I am so totally on the rag.
Duke calls it my “meriod.” Maybe the full moon has something to do with it, too.
My day at work started out with me saying, “Really? You really don’t remember us having a conversation about this………YESTERDAY?”
And for some reason, I assumed our condo’s court hearing would be somewhere in the Loop, within walking distance of my office. So it’s a rude surprise when I look it up online half an hour before I’m supposed to be there and see that it’s way north and way west of me. It’s just past the gallery district, right by where Catty and I had to get fingerprinted for our background checks to prove we weren't sex offenders so we could volunteer on the Nocturnal Emissions bus.
I dash down the eight flights of stairs and out onto Dearborn. I call Duke to bitch about my stupidity, but luckily, once I hang up with him, a 22 bus comes right along. I get on and take it up to Chicago Ave. Then I run. It’s about ten blocks west and one block south, and I get there ten minutes before the hearing, passing through security just as one of my neighbors does.
One of the guys on the first floor is already here, and he tells us the Third-Floor Lawyer’s lawyer is in a closed-door session with the representative from the city. The lawyer comes out right before the hearing and he’s quite a famine for the eyes. He’s about four feet tall, bug-eyed, balding, dwarfish, with a bulbous growth above his eye. The munchkin tells us that we’re lucky – the city is only going to fine us $700, plus $75 for court costs. Somehow we don’t feel so lucky. I am so totally going to get a voodoo doll of Toop, who narced us out to the city.
In fact, it pisses me off – we weren’t expecting any fine, and we have no idea what went on behind that closed door. We can’t help but wonder if we would have been better off explaining our case, showing that we’ve repaired one of the infractions already and have estimates on the others. Munchkin doesn’t even have a clue about our situation.
But we’ll never know if we would have been better off representing ourselves. Third-Floor Lawyer hired this guy and said he’d cover the costs – maybe lawyers have this qui-pro-quo Silence of the Lambs-type agreement – and it’s not like we could say, No, you can’t have a lawyer present.
So the judge talks to the lawyer and it’s over in five seconds and we only have until June 2 to have everything fixed, including a new porch – Chicago porches are notoriously crappy, and after a bunch of New Trier High School graduates died in a porch collapse a few years ago, the city has finally cracked down.
After the hearing, 1-South grumbles, “I showered for THIS?”
The three of us in the condo association stand on the corner and rehash the trial and determine what we have to do now and we bash Toop, our nemesissy, who got us into this mess. 1-South, who lives right below him, tells us, “I’ve heard things that I don’t want to hear,” and we all groan and cover our ears.
I’m standing in front in a RedEye box, the Chicago Tribune’s bratty little sister, and some random Black dude comes over and says, “Excuse me, I know there’s something in here for me.” I move out of the way, so I can’t see what he reaches in and pulls out.
“Well that wasn’t shady at all,” 1-South says.
“What did he take out?” I ask.
“A knife,” both he and 1-North say at the time.
“Whoa!”
We watch the man cross the street, where he, to our surprise, gets into a burgundy PT Cruiser and drives away.
“What else is in here?” I wonder, opening the bright red newspaper box. There’s some black plastic device on the bottom. It occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t be touching this, but I grab it and pull it out.
“It looks like a car alarm,” 1-South says.
“I was hoping for drugs,” I say.
Then: “What if it goes BOOM!” and I make an explosion with my hands.
Our eyes all go wide and we say, “Maybe we should head back now…”
I walk with 1-North for awhile. He’s a great guy and his two young daughters are a hoot. At our last condo meeting, Aria headed off to voice lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music. She’s about 9. As she walked down the hallway, she called out, “Enjoy your manhood!”
We all erupted in laughter.
“Thanks!” I shout back. “We have so little of it.”
“Wait a minute!” her dad called out. “Am I the only straight guy here?” (We’ve always wondered what the story was about the Invisible Man across the hall from us – but I think the terrible dance music we hear booming in the hall now and then pretty much seals the deal.)
And last night, their mom came down to ask if she could print out some photos of the building for the hearing. (No dice – our HP printer sucks and hasn’t worked for months.)
“Wait! You have to hear this. Coco’s latest thing is having boyfriends,” she says about her adorable 4-year-old who’s always messing up expressions – much like the door chick at Miss Ollie’s bar, who has said, “It’s all French to me!” and “Well…Look what the cat blew in!”
J. continues. “She’ll come home and say they ‘dumped on her’ and she has a new boyfriend. Well, last night I asked her who her boyfriend was and she said, ‘I don’t have a boyfriend. They all dumped on me. Eleanor’s my GIRLfriend now!’” Age four and already AC/DC. Kids grow up so fast these days.
"MOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!" Coco whined. "Ben's my boyfriend again!" Not surprisingly, her lesbianism was just a phase.
1-North and I cross over the river, and I pass Carmine getting into a cab. 1-North is all, “I thought you were waving to the cabbie,” and I drop him off at his office and I walk the rest of the way back to the South Loop, stopping to get a gyro and cheese fries cuz they’re greasy and taste so good.
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