Lake Michigan is churning. Not blue today. Khaki gray, though the backlight is mossy, these shades some mix of freshwater, weather, and industrial waste—a compromised beauty. I can’t see the other side, one hundred miles to where this color ends. Waves hit the cement shoreline and spray. Droplets light up the dead music legend tableau someone painted on the seawall, Jimi Hendrix jamming with green-headed aliens. I breathe, silver- headed alien body, Chicago-born aging queer woman, always and never at home here.
I might have wanted this waterfront first as a girl. I might have at least seen the pink hotel that used to mark this beach; the neighborhood historians say it was bright as a pink bulb. Did we ever drive up this far? Might have. I was a child here, the same city but twenty-eight miles south, the old millworkers’ neighborhoods just over the city line. But my dad liked to drive us up by where the rich people lived.
When I type our old far South Side address into a web map, my childhood house pops up, a brown bungalow box, still standing, though the shrubs and flagstones are gone. The old block is tidy, the grass mowed around the houses and also in the powerline field across the street that grew wild then, before they changed the streetlights from metal-white to buggy-yellow and we called that semi-open space the prairie.
Along the lakefront landfill, where I live now, on the North Side, the prairie grass grows taller. Down south the prairie was industrial ground, and up here we walk on the fill where there used to be water, paved-over debris from the West Side neighborhoods the city tore down to make room for the interstate. This is an old story in Chicago, the city rebuilt on old ruined parts of itself. Cities are like bodies in that way. To drive from my newer-yet-older North Side body to my older-yet-younger South Side body on a Sunday, without traffic, takes forty-five minutes, and closer to two hours by CTA and commuter train. But really, it takes fifty years to get from that place to this one.
Linnea and I love watching the men walk to the beach down the avenue in front of our apartment, usually groups of three, four, five; the Parade of Gays we call them. From where we live now, it takes just six minutes to get to the water. The men come from Andersonville, a few blocks west, a neighborhood the lesbians used to call Girlstown, but some now call Man-dersonville instead.
When we brought our three-year-old nephew to the water, he had commentary. This is not a beach for kids, he said. This is a DADDY beach. Yes, and I like chatting with the daddies, or the cute young guys looking for daddies, when they stop to admire the old turrets of the building where I live. I have to work to make sure they see me. My spouse, SHE is the hunky one in the Cubs cap watering the plants, I tell the boys who like the looks of the garden. They blink and look away from the real estate to look at me again, adjust their view, laugh a little. I like living in the queer city. I wish for queers to see more queerly.
The old Edgewater Beach Hotel doesn’t show up when I type the name into the map. Everyone lives around here now except the upper crust who lived here before. Once it was a getaway where the movie stars gathered: Marilyn Monroe, Betty Davis, Frank Sinatra. The high-rise apartments weren’t built yet, and little water planes took rich people down to the Loop to shop, paparazzi bulbs bursting as celebrities crossed the grounds. They tore that part of the joint down in 1970, the carpets and wallpaper ragged, gangsters in the banquet halls, the beach gone, cut off by the highway, Lake Shore Drive part boulevard, part freeway.
But some old-timers talk as if the hotel were still standing. The only building left is the Edgewater Beach Apartments, which I can see out my lake-facing windows. The pink stucco walls loom, and there’s always a ripped American flag flying from up top. Once a scraggly guy on the street stopped me when I was walking the poodle to the beach to tell me: old-timers living in the pink apartments could fish out the lakefront windows because that’s how close the water came then. Photographs prove the water story, but I don’t believe him about the fishing. I like the image, though, fishing line spouting out all the windows. I don’t like the image of fish catching the lake light as they’re pulled into some plush living room. I hate the idea of breathing creatures caught on a patrician’s hook.
At the sand beach around the corner, gay men gather in micro briefs, huddled knee to knee, all their business clear. Gay men are their own movie stars here, posing for each other as if the paparazzi bulbs burst and shatter in the urban sand around their feet, as if they will always be young enough to stay at the party too long. Girl circles interrupt only here and there, at the edges, young lesbians in little bikinis my generation rejected, but no worries about the male gaze here where girls are not the object. These women all seem to have just one sweet-faced, gay-man friend in cutoff jeans and a ponytail. That boy would have been my friend when I was their age. They are all beautiful. Am I making this clear? Every one of them is a raving beauty, especially the ones who don’t know they are.
Why do people remember the buildings that used to be? I might have seen the old hotel before they smashed it down, or maybe not. When I walk here now, I imagine the old resort is still standing, the rosy walls of the shorter building, lighting up pinkly against the dusk, then dimming, the yellow building pale against the churning green water, sunny mornings a yellow light turned up high.
Neighborhood histories describe the colors, the light, the illuminations of the buildings, one built to represent a beach sunrise, the other a sunset, but the old photos are black and white. History is imaginary; how splendid that vanished past, how we miss what used to be, those evil apartheids, prettier in pictures, the crowds, the bands, the dancers, white faces, paired off boy-girl, girl-boy. So many were not invited, here in the beautiful refuge. Even the Big Bands that played the famous jazz rooms had white faces made whiter by camera light.
Why do people come to the water? The gay men come for community, for the party, for the talk that comes before sex. Others come with books, with cameras, with beach chairs, with strollers, with dogs. Some come out for calisthenics, some with lunch. Some come from the Uptown group homes, or one of the homeless tent cities under the viaducts, to converse with invisible companions or to shout out at the water. A tall sullen man with a red beard walks three stoic Airedales every afternoon, one of whom always carries a plastic water bottle in its mouth. Some passersby might be middle-aged queers like myself. Some of the Slav speakers might be from the same coastal region of Croatia as my grandfather. I come here for borderless water and unknowable time. No one I meet at the water has discussed much of anything with me but the poodle.
One beach day, I pass a few Spanish-speaking trans kids, sitting with bent legs at the end of the lighthouse pier. They look beyond the boy parties— where more of the men than not are masculine and white—out at the water, beyond, to the deeper waters where more boy parties throb from the decks of boats flying rainbow flags. Are the pretty beach parties just another hook? A question only an old odd body would ask.
Immigrant families walk the beach periphery in silence, men and women in separate clumps with just a few crossovers, not unlike the beach parties. The Nepali families are mostly silent, smiling out at Chicago’s ocean, speaking softly, walking slowly, and nodding to each other, but the Slav speakers chatter, some of them stopping to cluck at the poodle. Very pretty. I used to have dachshunds back home, says Anna from the Czech Republic, her eyes retreating, until the poodle, who loves to be loved, wags her back.
Why can’t people forget our bodies as they used to be? Our former selves, the shadows of vanished buildings we walk through, imagining living differently, if only we had those old structures back, imagining the architectures themselves were not part of the problem. Why is it harder to make a new infrastructure than it is to vanquish the old ones?
Sometimes you pretend to see yourself here, as you never were, at this hotel where your South Side steel-mill people would not have been invited except maybe to work, lounging in the swing, sashaying across that dance floor, the photographers’ bulbs exploding, your dress hiding yet revealing your breasts like Marilyn Monroe in that movie where she plays the ukulele at a beachy resort not unlike this one. You imagine leaning into light that’s never offered. Not just you. Everyone. America. Even when we know (Oh, Marilyn) too much wanting to be wanted, too much reaching back to fill in the existing template, might be what kills us all in the end.
It’s never crowded on the cement side of the bend where swimming is forbidden, though this is Chicago, where people ignore signs, ignore evidence, ignore all the stories that came before, and jump into the big lake from the seawall. On Labor Day weekend last year, in the wee hours after the parties went home, someone died jumping in, lit up with booze and who knows what traditions. I hope he was beautiful to himself as he took that last plunge.
The Chicago Park District sign calls this corner Contemplation Point, and sometimes people don’t dance or jump in. They contemplate, right here where I want the last of me scattered along with the ashes of Linnea and my dogs. The contemplators sit alone on the stone blocks strewn across the grass like a miniature Stonehenge, staring out toward the far light of southern Michigan. Sometimes from this stone I can almost make out the better-made city I want to dream into being, a city with no hooks and only hybrid traditions, a city with all the old and odd bodies beloved and visible. Sometimes I wonder what kinds of dead beauties the old brooders like me have to stop missing, before this new city has room to be.
Lake Michigan is flat and glassy today. If I dove in, the surface might crack like a mirror, parts of me scattered, young thighs, old elbows, so many hair styles and faces over years—but I never come here to swim. I walk through compacted time. Blue-glass high-rises fill up the space where the hotel used to be. Most days the temperature drops near the water. Some days there is a breeze, some days a strong wind. I come out to exercise the poodle, to watch, to document, to change my pulse. Echoes of old photo bulbs crack as I cluck my tongue to the poodle, teasing out her movie star smile, though sometimes I leave her face out of the photographs. The water is what matters, whatever makes the color so blue and pink today, as long-dead vacationers brush against my shoulder and wonder who let this old tattooed lady through the fence. There is no more fence. The pink shadows dust over the dusk, but this history will someday also scatter. We will live forward. Anyone can come here. I come as a necessity, a calling, a homecoming, alight to myself. I come with so much more making before me. It took me years to arrive.
Barrie Jean Borich is author of Apocalypse, Darling which PopMatters said “ . . . soars and seems to live as a new form altogether. It’s poetry, a meditation on life as ‘the other,’ creative non-fiction, and abstract art.” Her memoir Body Geographic won a Lambda Literary Award and her book-length essay, My Lesbian Husband won the Stonewall Book Award. Borich teaches at DePaul University where she edits Slag Glass City, a journal of the urban essay arts.