A Walk Down Memory Lane

I was in the West Town, Wicker Park area recently to see a show. I used to hang out around there a lot in the early 90s because that's where my psychopathic then-boyfriend lived. This was a couple years before Details magazine proclaimed Wicker Park to be the world's hippest neighborhood, and a couple decades before its current incarnation.

If you walked around the neighborhood back then you saw plenty of homeless people and vacant lots. In fact, many of the homeless people set up little encampments on the vacant lots with tents and other amenities. There was one guy I used to see that I was kind of afraid of. He had only one leg and had actually fashioned a wooden leg from an oar, like Peg-Leg Pete or something.

Well, one morning I was trudging to the El dressed in my suit on my way to work with only a couple hours of sleep due to my accomodation to the boyfriend's psychopathic lifestyle. Suddenly I found myself flying into the air and landing on the sidewalk. When I was able to take stock of the situation I realized that there was dog shit all over my shoe, and it had evidently provoked my fall. Dismayed, I looked up and saw the guy with the wooden leg gazing down at me. "I slipped in dog shit," I wailed. "That's OK," he told me. "You can wipe it off." This is one of the nicer things that has happened to me over the years, and makes me think that homeless people could be angels or Jesus or something.