Life in 'the hood'

Occasionally I have to take the "EL" to get to classes if I leave late enough in the day. It's sometimes a bit unnerving because campus is in Hyde Park--the south side of Chicago, the sketchier side. I take the Metra an hours' ride to the city then walk a few blocks from Ogilvie Transportation Center to the Green-Line stop on Clinton St. That line takes me about 35 minutes south to within a mile of campus but I usually wait for a bus that takes me straight there from the El stop, Garfield. Unfortunately, the Garfield stop is in a rough neighborhood and I usually have my expensive laptop with me (thankfully carried in a bag that looks like a normal backpack). There's a small grocery/liquor store there so you tend to see a lot of older men loitering around there drinking out of brown bags. I tend to get asked for money a lot at that stop as well.

Thursday was the first time I would have to take this route in over a month and some of the 'used-to-it' feeling had worn off. I had nearly reached the Garfield stop and remember thinking at about that point, "This isn't so bad," when I saw one man in the car a few seats in front of me quickly move closer to another man who had got on a few stops back. The two of them talked secretively and furtively glanced toward the conductor at the front of the car. Moving quickly to the two open seats four feet in front of me, they conveniently faced to my left so that I could observe everything going on between them. The newer passenger handed five or six little, clear plastic bags full of small, green-colored leaves to the other in exchange for a small wad of cash! A drug deal--I observed a drug deal on the El! Other passengers who knew what was going on acted as if nothing abnormal had just happened. In fact, one woman sitting directly facing the perpetrators asked the man who purchased the drugs if she could see them. He handed a couple of the packages to her and she closely looked them over and smelled them before giving them back. One would have thought they might have been just as easily purchasing food or a souvenir. I couldn't believe it. What do I do with that?

I got off at my stop, a little more paranoid than normal and trying to convince myself not to be irrational. Who was to meet me at the bus stop but Eric Johnston, or that's who he introduced himself to be. He wore a dirtied, dark wool coat, an old winter hat, worn pants, and stained boots. He appeared to be homeless but he made a point to say, "I wouldn't say that I'm homeless, but... I'm kind of in between living situations." Whatever that means. He proceeded to ask for me to pay the bus fare which he said "thank you" for before I actually agreed, haha. But I decided I could do that. I'd rather pay his fare than just give him cash. He said he had some business to do on the other side of the U of C campus and then talked almost non-stop from that point as we waited for the bus, through the bus ride (he sat next to me), and until I got off about how he was a jazz pianist and all the people he'd played with since he got out of the army. It was genuinely fascinating, I was just skeptical about how much of it I could believe.

Anyway, welcome back to the neighborhood, right? OK,it's not really my neighborhood, but I'm down there a lot.