Megan Stielstra's Blog

Barefoot Productions is a Chicago-based company committed to the collaborative process. One of their many projects, Static, is a temporary collective pairing artists of different mediums around a certain theme. In the case of last week, I had the pleasure to tell stories in tandem with the visual art of Theatser Gates and the sound design of Todd Carter. Our theme: the green line.

"Mecca," I said to one of Barefoot's three directors (Mecca, Joanna and Jena. Powerful ladies, great visionaries and kick-ass dressers. What more can you ask for?). "You want ME to tell a story about the green line?" I've been off the blue line for nearly ten years. I'd never even BEEN on the green line before this project. "All the better," she told me. "It's the new perspective. The different perspective--I don't want you to speak for people who live off the green line, I want you to speak for yourself, and we'll see what we all can realize through different eyes."

So, Mecca and Theaster and I (and Mecca's little boy, Masani, who is two but will soon save the world, mark my words) took the green line one day a few months back, and told all sorts of stories, and I watched out the windows at this whole section of my city I'd never before seen and, for the upteenth time, chastized myself for rarely moving beyond my one little corner of the world. I say to my students: Get out into the city! Get out of the South Loop and Hyde Park and be a part of it! It breathes, this city! It lives, it moves! See it, see it! And while I've listened to my own advice in the past, I've only done so in one direction: North.

I remember, after I came back from a year in Prague, thinking that I knew THAT city better than I knew THIS city (granted, it's smaller, but you get my drift). We went EVERYWHERE in Prague--from the center straight out to the border of the Czech Republic. And yet here, my home, I haven't even discovered the half of it.

A thought-provoking experience, to say the least.

Anyhow, here is the story I told at Static, at the Old Market Gallery on Dorchester, last Friday night. Todd wired the walls with speakers and, standing in the hallways, you can hear the train all around you, and Theatser's sculptures and video installations fill the rest of the space, including a map of the CTA made of rubber wire that encourages you to mark your own home along its route. The work will be up for another month if you'd like to check it out ... more info on that is here.

"I just saw the craziest thing on the green line. This guy—he was all fancy suit and briefcase, all kinds of style, like, if he didn’t have some serious cash flow going on he knew how to fake it, like maybe one of his women worked at Neimans and he rocked that discount or some loaded Aunt kicked it and he signed the inheritance check over to the Barney’s Co-op—so anyway, this guy stands up and says, real loud over the voices, the bodies, the in-and-out and coming-and-going and steady static of train on track, “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please?” We’ve just left Clarke, heading South to Ashland&63rd. Now, if you’ve never been on the downtown green line, it moves above-ground through the Loop. High-rise buildings are stacked up on both sides, you can’t see where you’re going or where you’ve been, and sometimes, when you’re between platforms, you can pretend there’s no track beneath you and you’re flying, levitating, suspended in mid-air Today—six p.m. on a Friday—the train was half full, all us nine-to-fivers who stay an extra hour after work so we can avoid the rush-hour jam, hundreds of tired, business-causal people sardine-packed together on the cta headed home. It’s the fucking WORST. Ten hours on the job and you walk out of work, into the pulse of that crazy crowd moving through the streets towards the nearest underground access and all I want, in that moment, is to be I Dream of Jeannie, to cross my arms in front of me, nod my head and—BOINK— there I am on my couch in Humbolt Park, martini in one hand and remote control in the other. What I wouldn’t give for travel to be that EASY—BOINK—there I am at rehearsal—BOINK—there I am at the grocery store—BOINK—there I am reading my story at Static—but, and I hate to break this to you all, I’m not a genie in a bottle. I don’t have that kind of magic. What I’ve got is a UPass, a backpack, and, tonight, the green line.

“Excuse me!” this guy was saying. He’s standing in between the two parallel exit doors at the far end of the train, his arms open wide like he’s leaning on some invisible podium. I’m sitting right in front of him, in that first row that makes a right angle with the elderly and handicapped bench. I’m facing the opposite direction of the train’s forward movement, so out the window to my left I can watch the Loop zip backwards away from me: the white, old Chicago architecture; glass and gray stone skyscrapers; brown-red brick walk-ups with their windows caged in fire escapes. I imagine the city built up around the train line, like in Sci-Fi movies where public transports glide through thin air. The green line, it should be noted, does not so much glide as rattle, shivering on its tracks like some turn-of-the-century roller coaster. The sound is intense: this constant, animal growl at the low end; the shuffle of people sitting down and getting up; chunks of conversation flowing in and out like, “Can you believe he said that?” and “I didn’t know she—”and “Sammy, get yer butt over here!” and that metallic, robotic baritone telling you that “This is State,” “This is Randolph,” “This is Madison/Adams/Roosevelt—“ shut your eyes and listen. It’s like an audio map of the city. You can see it—that great red, blue, green and brown grid that connects us all.

“I don’t want to bother you, ladies and gentlemen,” the guy continued, and all around him, people were working overtime to pretend he didn’t exist: reading the paper, reading books, staring out the window, dicking around with their iPods. They all know what’s gonna happen next, right? First, he’ll tell us he’s not a drug addict. Then he’ll talk about his family, tell us how many kids he’s got at home. “Can you help me?” he’ll ask. “Any little bit will do.” He’ll try to meet people’s eyes, then, and some people will look and some people won’t. They’ll make a choice—to see what’s going on in front of their face, or not to see anything at all. We make that choice everyday—do we notice that hungry kid or that lonely friend, those people down the street or that country on the TV—I’m not going to lie to you. I look away a lot. There’s been many a ride on the blue line staring into my book, ignoring what’s right in front of me, but today—Today—I chose to see. I looked up at him, and we looked at each other, and this is what I saw: he was … really good looking. He doesn’t look like the guy who’d be asking for cash, cute as was, dressed as swanky as he was, smiling as much as he did. I told myself for the gazillionth time: Megan, stop with the assumptions. Stop thinking you know what’s what, Jesus Christ, you’re thirty years old, that’s old enough to know that soon as you think you’ve got a thing pegged, it’s gonna veer a total one-eighty from everything you’re so goddamn sure about.

“I know you take this train every day,” he said, first just to me and then stepping back to address the whole train. “This is how you connect. It’s how you move. It’s how you can live and work and everyday you take it and every day is the same, it’s Roosevelt, Cermack, 35th, the same, monotonous, day every day—“ the people trying to ignore him were looking up by then— “but today,” he went on, “TODAY—my friends. TODAY is going to be different.”

I glanced at the guy sitting next to me, then at the guy in the elderly and handicapped seat and the woman sitting next to him and, then, back around at the people behind us—we were all sorts of people, all sorts of lives and families and colors and purposes, and in this moment we were all thinking exactly the same thing: what the fuck is this guy talking about?

“Today,” he went on, “I’m going to give you something different. I call this piece, ‘Black Professional Man Laying Down on the Train.’” And with that, he lay down on the ground, arms crossed over his chest like he was floating in a swimming pool, and didn’t move for the remainder of the ride.
The silence was something huge—even with all the noise of the train. Everyone just sat there, staring at this man laying on the ground. Oh my God, I thought. I gotta tell the people at Static about this. I knew y’all wouldn’t believe me, though, and so—because I, like most folks, am a slave to modern technology—I got out my cell phone and took a picture.

“What are you doing?” asked the guy sitting next to me. I told him it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen on the el, and he said, “Girl, you ain’t seen NOTHING—” and then launched into the craziest thing he’d ever seen on the el. When he was done, the guy in the elderly and handicapped seat told us the craziest thing HE’D seen on the el, and when he was done, the woman in the next seat leaned over and started telling her story, and then lots of people were listening and talking and laughing.

I looked back out the window: it’s fall now, and getting dark, but I could still see the ground rumbling by below me—the parking lots and wild grass and wide, open sky overhead. It was so different out here, at 51st, 55th and 63rd. I could see the Sears Tower off in the distance, it looked so far away we could be in Indiana for all I knew—so much open space, empty, abandoned lots full of trash and broken glass next to pop-up condos and fancy SUVs. I’d never been in this neighborhood before but I was familiar with its story: the same inevitable tale as when I’d first moved to Chicago ten years. I rented a one-bedroom, shit hole of a garden apartment in Wicker Park for three hundred dollars a month—If you ride the blue line past that apartment now, you’ll see a fancy SUV parked behind it. It rents for thirteen hundred dollars now—I ran into my old landlord on the street—and I moved West. West of Western, West of California, West of the Boulevard, West of Kedzie, and now, West of Kimball to my current place on Pierce. Next door is a seventy-year-old grandmother named Mz. Diaz who lives in a single family home with her two daughters, their husbands and all their kids, and also her sister and her sister’s son and his kids. They all work except Mz. Diaz—she stays home with the little ones—and we talk everyday when I walk my dog. I have a two year old pit bull named Mojo, and whever Mz. Diaz’s grandkids see him they go nuts: MO-yo, mo-yo, they yell, running up to us, and then they stop and ask, “May I please pet your dog?” very politely like I taught them when I first brought Mojo home. “Some dogs aren’t very nice,” I told them, “don’t ever pet a dog you don’t know.” Mz Diaz looked at me and nodded her approval, as though I’d passed some sort of test, and we’ve talked every day since then. I know that, as I push West, so does she, and West of us are more folks pushing West, and there on the green line, riding high into open space, I see the same chapter being written out below me.

This afternoon, walking the dog before coming here tonight, Mz. Diaz said,
“You are always going somewhere.” she is small and wrinkled, always smiling. “Where to today?”

“I have a reading on the South Side,” I said. “I’m going to take the bus downtown and jump on the green line.”

She shook her head gravely. “You should drive,” she informed me, her voice all authoritarian like she was my grandmother, too. “The green line is dangerous. Very dangerous for someone like you.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. The green line is dangerous for someone like me. So is the orange line. And the red line South of Jackson. And all of the South side, for that matter, and the West Side, too, and also Humboldt Park and Wicker Park ten years ago and the city of Chicago and every city and most non-English speaking countries and if I’d of kept still every time I’d ever been told, “that’s dangerous for someone like you,” shit, I’d never of learned a thing in this life. I’d never of sat there on the green line, hearing all those stories, and traveling to a place where I could share them with all of you.

Right before I got off at 63rd, I knelt down on the floor near Black Professional Man Lying Down and whispered, “I’m glad I can’t be I dream of Jeanie. I’m glad I saw something different. I’m glad of all there is to see.”