Going to Chicago

Going to Chicago

A Novel

Rob Levandoski

New York

To my father, the real Clyde
,

one of the original Three Travelers

“
You have come here to see the great drama of man's struggle to lift himself to the stars. The spectacle is enormous, for it includes all the manifestations of man's restless energies—the patient laborious researches of the cloistered scientist, exploration, adventure, war, the vast works of industry, the slow climb from the naked cave man to his descendant of today
.”

O
FFICIAL
G
UIDE
B
OOK OF THE
W
ORLD
'
S
F
AIR

One/Monkey Wrench

Do I remember the Great Depression? Goddamn. Sonofabitch. I remember it. So many people out of work. Out of hope things would ever get better. The whole country wobbly with worry. That's not to say young people didn't have their big dreams. Their burning ambitions. Their uncontrollable urges. They did.

The one thing Will Randall and I had that smoldering August of 1934 was ants in our pants. We'd lived the meat of our lives there in Bennett's Corners, Ohio. Done everything there was to do a thousand times. As Will used to say, we were ready to kill that place. Ready to go kill someplace else. Even if it was just for a little while.

Will first got the bug to go to the Chicago World's Fair in 1930, I guess it was, when we entered the high school in Brunswick Center and our English teacher, Miss Ina Mae Blanche, informed us we were on the doorstep of adulthood, that it would be a good idea to start reading the newspaper, to know what was going on in the world. “Miss Blanche,” I wisecracked from my desk in the back. “We already know what's going on in the world. Nothing good!”

I got the giggles I expected.

“All the more reason to read the paper, isn't it then, Mr. Ace Gilbert?” Miss Blanche said. While I squirmed, Will, like Moses dutifully chiseling the Ten Commandments in stone, wrote in his spiral notebook:
Start reading the newspaper
.

And of course he did start reading the newspaper. From that day on. Every afternoon after school, before changing his clothes or even taking a leak, he'd walk over to Ruby & Rudy's General Store and page through one of the
Cleveland Presses
stacked on the counter. He'd read every story, never tearing or creasing or smudging a single page, and then he'd put it back on the stack so no one would suspect they were buying a used paper. Ruby and Rudy didn't mind. They liked Will Randall. And so did I.

That was how Will learned about the World's Fair being planned in Chicago, from an article in the
Cleveland Press
. That was when he started planning our pilgrimage. “You and I are going to that fair,” he announced one Saturday afternoon when we were sharing an eight-ounce Coca-Cola in front of his father's Shell garage.

“I'm game,” I said.

He already had it worked out in his head. “Lucky for us, the Fair is on a collision course with our coming of age,” he said. “It'll open in May of 1933. We'll still be too young to go that year. But it's going to run for two consecutive summers, Ace. Two consecutive summers! That second summer we'll be graduated. Making our own decisions. And that's when we'll go.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

Let me say right here that Will Randall and I were two very different squirrels. He was just as adventurous as me, but unlike me, he was purposeful and cautious, reluctant to do anything, or try anything, that didn't somehow enrich his life. He'd agonize for days over doing the simplest things, weighing the good and bad of it until I was out of my mind. When he did decide to undertake something, he then had to plan it out. Make lists. Timetables. Draw maps. Decide in advance how every minute should and would unfold. He'd prepare for every possible emergency, no matter how remote. He carried a safety pin in his pants pockets just in case his zipper broke, for christsake. Just that kind of squirrel.

The World's Fair became an obsession with him. The more information he amassed about it, the more information he needed, and the more he had to go see the Fair for himself. He wasn't content with the occasional stories he found in the
Press
. He had his Aunt Mary in Indiana send him clippings from the Chicago papers. At night he zeroed in on the big Chicago radio stations, WENR, WGN—Will had the fingers of a safecracker when it came to a radio dial—and WLS, his favorite because it was owned by the same big wonderful company that sold him the very radio he listened to them on, Sears & Roebuck. For a graduation present, his aunt sent him an
Official Guide Book of the World's Fair
, personally signed by Fair president Rufus C. Dawes. To Will, it was like receiving an autographed Bible. It was filled with photographs and maps and page after page of the grandest-sounding manure you ever read in your life. He shoveled every word of it into his brain. Tried to shovel my brain full, too.

Needless to say, our reasons for going to the World's Fair were night and day. Will wanted to see the technological wonders of the modern age, as he continually put it, to understand how things ticked, to find out what the smart people of the world were thinking and doing, to prepare himself for the glorious future that was sure to wash the depression from our shores any day now. I wasn't against preparing myself for the glorious future. I liked knowing how things ticked as well as the next guy. But the closer we got to our trip, the clearer my reason for going became. I wanted to find a willing city girl and poke her.

So after four years of thinking and planning, and me masturbating like a fool, we were going to Chicago! Nothing could stop us. Not the Depression. Not the embarrassing death of Will's father the previous summer. We were eighteen. High school graduates. Men. The only question that remained now was whether Will's younger brother Clyde was going with us.

Neither Will nor I wanted Clyde to come along. Reason One: Clyde was only thirteen. Reason Two: Clyde was a pain in the ass. But Will had so painstakingly built up the educational value of the World's Fair to his mother, that she insisted Clyde go with us. “Clyde's got to prepare himself for the glorious future, too,” she said. No sense arguing. Mrs. Randall was as hard and sour as the times.

Good news struck two days before we were to leave. Clyde's left ear clogged up with wax. No way he could go to Chicago now, we figured, not with the side of his head throbbing. Lucky for us Clyde's threshold for pain was low.

It didn't take much to start him crying. Well, you couldn't really call it crying; it was this endless hum, like an old radio with bad tubes, that just went on and on, loud when the pain sharpened, soft when the pain eased, but always there.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
. You just wanted to reach out and slap his head, just like you'd slap an old radio with bad tubes.

The danger, of course, was that Clyde's wax wouldn't be bad enough to keep him home; only bad enough to make our trip miserable. A week-long adventure in the great city of Chicago, Illinois, serenaded every minute by that endless, endless hum. Will wasn't as worried as me, though. “Don't fret it, Ace,” he said, “Mother won't let Clyde out of bed, much less out of Bennett's Corners. It'll be just you and me killing the road. Just you and me, Ace, drinking in the technological wonders of the modern age.”

“While Clyde lays in bed humming,” I added joyfully.

The morning before we were to begin our journey west, Mrs. Randall threw us a most unexpected monkey wrench. She decided to take Clyde to the doctor. Will was absolutely dazed with disbelief. So was I. Mrs. Randall had never taken either of her boys to the doctor before. She was as tight with a dollar as she was hard and sour. In the Randall family, unless you were on your deathbed, you just rode your afflictions out. In the six years I'd lived in Bennett's Corners, Will had ridden out the mumps, an abscessed molar, a bladder infection that turned his urine yellow as an egg yolk, and a cut from a rusty Boy Scout hatchet that went right to the white of his knuckle bones. God knows how many undoctored maladies Clyde hummed his way through.

Will called me right after his mother and Clyde headed off in the tow truck for Berea, the nearest town with a doctor. “Where you at?” Will asked without a hello. “We got a lot to do today.” I could hear him pacing the linoleum right through the receiver.

“I just finished loading my stuff,” I said. “I'll be there soon as my mother fixes lunch.”

“You packed your new coffee pot, didn't you?”

“Absolutely,” I said. I used the word
absolutely
all the time in those years. Guess I liked the reassuring pop of it.

“And the coffee?”

“Absolutely.”

“I bought an extra pound just in case,” he said.

“For two guys who don't drink coffee, we're sure taking enough,” I said.

“We'll want to drink lots of it when we get on the road,” he said.

Just the way Will said that—“when we get on the road”—made me want a cup of roadside coffee as much as I wanted to find a willing city girl. As it turned out we wouldn't brew a single pot the entire week. And not because of what happened to us. Even if things had gone as planned it's doubtful we would have made any. But it was a wonderful thought that morning on the phone: Will and me sitting on the side of the road over a campfire, hundreds of miles from home, bitter steam rolling out the nose of that big tall pot I'd bought at Ruby & Rudy's. I wouldn't become a coffee drinker until World War II; all those years when I was in England, every cup I drank, and it was ten or fifteen a day, made me think of Will Randall and the pots of roadside coffee we never drank on our trip to the Chicago World's Fair. “Mother's motioning for me to get off the phone,” I said to Will. “See you about one.”

“One? Jeez, Ace. We got a lot to do.”

We did have a lot to do: Load the old Boy Scout tent and Will's gear into my car; walk over to Ruby & Rudy's and buy our groceries; and then after the fifteen minutes all that would take, sit on the porch for eight or nine hours while Will studied the ink off the new Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois road maps he'd ordered through the Shell Oil district man. That would take us right to bedtime, and after a good night's sleep, which we knew full well we wouldn't get, we'd be killing the road. “I'll come straight after lunch,” I promised.

“You better. We got a lot to do.”

“Absolutely. How's Clyde's wax?”

The life went out of Will's voice. “Mother's on the way to the doctor with him now.”

“You're kidding me!”

“Wish I was.”

“That's awful, Will. What if the doctor fixes him? You don't think she'd actually make us take him along, do you?”

Will hung up without saying good-bye.

I ate lunch as fast as I could. It was probably bacon and eggs. We ate bacon and eggs morning, noon, and night in those depression years, given that we raised chickens and pigs on our little farm on Stony Hill Road. I hugged my mother and told her not to worry. I'd said good-bye to my dad that morning when he left for work. Somehow he was hanging onto his job at the B. F. Goodrich Rubber Company in Akron, though he'd been demoted from salaried foreman to hourly tire-builder and his hours had been cut to twenty a week. We were very grateful for those twenty hours. That stink of rubber on his overalls was more reassuring than anything Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to say. I headed for my Model T.

I loved that old machine. If I was going to Chicago, it was flying with me. I say
flying
for a reason. My whole life was wrapped up in flying then. My dad had flown with the 94th Aero Squadron in World War I, the famous Hat in the Ring bunch. In fact, he and the great Eddie Rickenbacker were best friends, just like Will and I were best friends.