Big Money

I had always planned on never returning to Chicago. It was one of those private vows made without ever having to be formally declared, but that nonetheless exist in their own right, like the desire to some day get married or have children. From the moment I left for college I considered my break with the city irrevocable. Despite its size and diversity, I thought of the city as provincial; as a place of tight, confined borders from which people rarely ventured, and where a distinct brand of Midwestern racism and ignorance lived and thrived. These were the general terms on which I had experienced the city as a child and to which I still, however unfairly, held it. By the time I was old enough to leave, several close friends had slipped into a temporary life of drugs and gangs, while plenty of others remained permanently rooted, either through teenage pregnancies or short-lived high-school careers, to the small-town suburbs in which we had grown up. I had been called a nigger dozens of times in high school, and with bigger, and meaner, friends taking the lead I had later gone out of my way to frighten young white couples walking along the lake shore. And while of course I knew at the time that none of this was unique to Chicago, I was convinced that the city itself was somehow guilty of creating at least some of the anger and contempt I often felt, if only because there had to be something more specific than human nature to blame.

Chicago was not a small Midwestern town, although on the many nights I spent fantasizing about my future life somewhere along the east coast or in Europe, I treated it again, however unfairly, as if it were. I still loved the city for its aesthetics and even though at that time I had travelled to only a handful of other places in America, I was right in assuming that few could match the splendour of driving north along Lake Shore Drive and watching the skyscrapers and Lake Michigan gradually unfold in almost competing strains of beauty – the city all towering glass and stone with the massive lake, almost always flat and placid, lapping up against it.

When my father’s diagnosis came in I was living in Brooklyn and working part-time for a well-known writer and her son. I had just finished my MFA at Columbia University and was working on the fourth revision of a novel set, appropriately enough, in a small Midwestern town destroyed in a flood. I spent my evenings going to readings and parties or at various bars with friends, drunkenly imagining our own bright literary futures as we heaped lavish praise on the writers we adored and indulged in mocking all of the others. My girlfriend at the time, an aspiring human rights lawyer who had reared herself out of poverty and into law school, stood sceptically to the side.

‘There’s nothing real to what you’re doing,’ she told me more than once, describing my life at times as self-indulgent, at other times as pretentious and overly romantic, which of course it was, in part because that was precisely what I had sought – a life of intellectual languor, where days and nights were spent in the company of big ideas that were stifled only by the constant presence of a hangover.

Despite how enamoured I thought I might have been with my life, the only private debate I had with myself about returning to Chicago was for how long. My father and I never discussed what role I would play when I was there. We said nothing at all about the business or who would take care of it while he recovered. During the one phone conversation that we had before I returned, he simply said he was going to be fine and I need not worry. He handed the phone back to my mother and it was to her that I said I was going to find a one-way ticket to Chicago in the following days, and that I would take leave from work or even quit my job so I could stay as long as needed. She briefly insisted that this wasn’t necessary. She said that I could come home for the surgery and then return to New York shortly afterwards, but her protests were only half-hearted and didn’t last long. I would like to say that this happened because I had been faithfully reared to believe in small sacrifices and the preservation of family above all else, and while there may have been some of that in my abrupt departure for home, there was also a greater unacknowledged understanding that my life was still not formed, that I was in danger of wasting it and that, more likely than not, after never having held down a real, stable job, I probably needed some money.