AN EERIE SLUMBER PARTY AT O’HARE - Feb 2020
After 8 years, I still appreciate the weird eerie nights on the road. I feel like the star of my own shitty movie. These nights can be uncomfortable, scary, exciting, miserable, barely-believable or all of the above, but it feels like I’m getting a lesson that a university lecture hall will never be able to provide.
Spending a night in the O’hare Chicago airport is the modern twilight zone. It’s a zombie film blended with that Tom Hanks movie where he’s stuck at the airport and sleeps in a corner forever. Tweakers, loiterers, career-drinkers and shifty characters roam the terminal 2 baggage area. Under fluorescent lighting, I wait for the check-in gates to open. It is 2:30am. I am Tom Hanks.
I’m half-sleeping sitting up, trying not to get robbed. I tie my backpack around my thigh and pop-a-squat over my guitar. Sketchy dudes wander in and out from the cold abyss of the Chicago sidewalks. A methy fella wrapped in a garbage bag frantically storms into one door and out the other. A hooded old lady sleeps next to me, snoring with her mouth agape. A pot-bellied man leaves a duffel bag on the chair next to me and walks off the premises. Security comes and captures the bag. I walk away from the bag briskly as it explodes in my head. I am Batman.
A middle-aged black gentlemen pushing a cart of construction buckets blasts Michael Jackson on a boom box. He doesn’t work there. He just somehow acquired a cart of buckets. The man walks so slowly down the corridor with no destination in mind.
There is an old insane lady covered in white plastic bags, following him in a wheel chair saying incredibly racist shit. “THERE WILL BE MASS MURDER AT OHARE AIRPORT COMMITTED BY AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN BETWEEN NOW AND NOON. THEIR HYGIENE IS VERY POOR. BRING IN 10,000 ARMY MEN OR NAVY SEALS IMMEDIATELY. DO IT NOW. I TOLD THE TRUTH. THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH SO HELP ME GOD.” Her cadence is dry and monotone, sounding much like the vocal delivery on the Ted Bundy confession tapes. She works her way down the corridor preaching non stop. Her arms don’t work well, so she drags herself in the wheelchair with her legs. Foot by foot. She monologues violent chatter for a full hour before passing out in her wheelchair. Haunting scene.
It’s weird to say this, but there’s almost nothing different between me and these folks except a few bad breaks. Sadly, American society often tags the homeless as somewhat of a parallel species, incompatible with everyone else. The people with homes don’t know how to interact with the people without homes. The homeless walk around O’hare ranting and raving uncontrollably, uninterrupted. The security doesn’t know what to do with them. The cops don’t know. Society doesn’t know either.
Every ten minutes presents a new character into this demented Kubrick-esque reality show. The Chinese guy next to me seems to be coherent. I think we have an unwritten, unspoken clause to look after each other’s bags.
Still, I better not sleep. If my guitar gets stolen, this tour is over before it started. Three flights await tomorrow. I’ll sleep on those. Now it’s 2:50am. I get a coffee to keep on alert. There’s a cool old lady working at the Starbucks. She tells me “oh baby! Every night’s a show here! Ya never know what ya gonna get!” She works the night shift and has seen it all: the homeless, the battered, the drugged out; coming into the airport from the wintery Chicago metro line seeking warmth. A new cast every night. A new show. Free admission.
Since I’m heading to South Africa, I packed light. I’m freezing my ass off in the airport terminal. Five more hours of this. I get a mini wave of warmth from the zamboni floor cleaner machine as the glassy-eyed, ponytail man pushes it past. I can’t tell if he works here or if he’s also in his own haze of lunacy and hijacked the zamboni.
The coffee is slightly warming my core now. It’s a terrible feeling to be chasing warmth all night, knowing you’re not going to get it. I’d get balls-naked and power hug a cactus under the Death Valley sun just to not be cold for a sec. I can’t imagine what it’s like for the homeless. Always chasing warmth in an endless race with no finish line.
In 48 hours I’ll begin my sixth tour of South Africa. I’ve been going there since I was 25. 8 years ago! The place keeps welcoming me back and I can hardly believe I’m on the map there. People will come and listen to songs I wrote when I was 21. I used to feel like a fraud in music, but now I feel unwavering confidence. I played the toilet bowl circuit long enough and paid the emo tax to get here. The tours are getting way better/easier and it’s about damn time.
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