I woke up and had breakfast with oversized early-risers before calling Gabe. I had met him during past travels, and he now had a job of some sort in the city. We hadn’t talked for years, but he seemed irrationally excited to hear my voice. He suggested I crash his couch that night. His job would take him to Milwaukee the following week, but his car was dead. In exchange for the hospitality, I’d drive north with him to his cabin for the weekend, and then I’d drop him off in Milwaukee. Sounded like a good deal, so I hit the road and made it to Chicago an hour later.

I stopped for gas in South Chicago before venturing further in the city, a sizeable mistake. The car wouldn’t start again. I asked the station clerk if he had jumper cables, and if he knew of a mechanic in the area… a car shouldn’t just stop working in the middle of summer. “Son, you picked the wrong place to breakdown.  It’s the ghetto here, niggers everywhere.” This is awkward, I thought. He was definitely Black. As were the customers in the station. To some extent, his statement was true. Though I wouldn’t have picked that specific wording, it was factual. He made it sound like a friendly warning and suggested I drive way north, past the Loop, to a specific Jiffy Lube and get them to check if the alternator was ok, so I did that. Driving through mid-day Chicago highway traffic with a stick transmission and the fear that the car could decide to stop working any minute was somewhat stressful, but I made it there safely and got the thing fixed.

Gabe sure didn’t feel like wasting time. His job was stressful, he said, so we started drinking from a flask before stepping through the door of his flat. “I got some weed here, take a few hits. I’ll take a quick shower and we leave”. We ended up in a shady dive on the lowest level of Wacker Drive; events got blurry. The sun was still up when we got there, that I know for sure. And it was dark when we left, but I definitely got a glimpse of dawn before blacking out. There is this thing about Americans and their drinks. I come from a place where the legal drinking age is merely a suggestion. By age 15, you’ve already got a good idea of how much you can drink before things get too wild to handle. But Americans, they have that underage prohibition thing working against them. When they hit 21, they feel the urge to make up for those lost years, and regardless of your tolerance for the stuff, they’ll drag you to their level and make you drink like a kid again.

“Fuck man, it’s morning afternoon already?” Gabe’s general definition of time was strange but accurate. We got up, washed our dried-out mouth with light lager and started packing for the cabin. We got in the car and the engine rolled fine. “Damn, forgot something”. He stormed in and out of the apartment in an instant and came back with a pint-sized metal bottle. “Ha! You forgot we’d get thirsty up there? Rum? Gin? Not tequila, please no.” “Chill man, it’s milk, for tomorrow morning.” His foresight and my lack thereof shook me.  Maybe I should start planning things more than a few hours in advance.

We sped through small towns smoking cheap cigars and listening to downbeat music as the sun set. He still had his flask, all was not lost.