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December 08, 2004

Money from the Streets

This morning driving to work I got a little aggrevated. I was a couple cars behind another one that stopped at every intersection and gave the "Homeless Hungry God Bless" crowd a dollar. Yeah, a dollar at each intersection. While I found that a little unbelievably nice, yet naive that wasn't the part that got to me.
What got to me was that he would wait until the light was green, then open his door holding out a dollar and wait until the homeless guy grabbed the dollar to drive off. One of the homeless guys was the quadruple prosthetic guy too, so you can just imagine how long I had to wait.

It reminded me of the time I got strangers on the street to give me money.
Correction: it reminded me of the time strangers on the street gave me money without me soliciting.

I had a roommate named Genna. For some reason she abandoned the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and moved into the apartment in a crooked little house in South Chicago I shared with Marty. The three of us lived there with my dog, Gluten, who we rarely saw because she was usually wedged in the space between the wall and the toilet bowl.
I got her as a puppy. It was a hot summer day when I brought her home from the pound, and seeking some sort of respite from the heat she curled herself around the toilet bowl. This quickly became her thing. She would emerge rarely, usually for water, not food (she rarely ate, and it got to a point where I started pretending to eat her food to get her to eat it), then go back to the toilet. After a while she became a little too big for the space behind the toilet. This meant that she spent even more time there, because she was stuck.
My roommates and I had a good time there. There was always a box of wine at the ready and we developed a pattern to its consumption. We would take oversized wine glasses (or in my case oversized salsa jars, because at the time I only drank out of salsa jars. They are large, cheap, and resealable, so could keep a beer in the jars over night if need be. Which always disgusted Marty's girlfriend Annie because she thought they were jars of urine; I did nothing to disabuse her of that notion) and swig our wine in gulps of exponents of 2 (ie 2^0, 2^1, 2^2, 2^3), usually finishing a glass by 2^5.
We'd cover ourselves with tinfoil and pretended to be aliens invading the earth. We drew on the tables, on the walls, we put buckets on the couch so they wouldn't soak up to much of the water that came in through the hole in the roof (we did the same with the coffee table and Marty's vinyl chair, but with only half as much vigilance as those items didn't soak up water like sponges and cause the apartment to smell of mildew). We invaded the nearby abandoned mattress factory and practiced our forklift driving. Sometimes we'd extricate Gluten from her self-imposed prison and take her for a walk next to the south branch of the Chicago River. We'd be amazed by the bubbling water, so amazed that occassionally we'd forget to count one of the passing maxipads, which is what we often went to the riverside to do. We also talked about videos and movies we had seen, in lieu of actually watching them since we had no TV or VCR.

Genna told us of an exciting Big Brother video she had seen. There was a lot of skateboarding in the video, but she was especially struck by the "aggressive street dancing" and the New Zealand Sheep wrestling. She was amused by both, but inspired by the aggresive street dancing. She wanted to bring it to the streets of Chicago. "Do you want to do it with me?"
"Aggresive street dance?"
"Yeah!"
"Oh. Yeah. I guess I could do that."
"Cool. Let's do it tomorrow."
"Agressive street dance?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. I guess. ... What do we do?"
"We've got to get dressed all funky - Wear those pants you usually wear and the shirt you're wearing now - and get a boom box with some dance music."
"Some raver gave me a Chad Minddrive tape, is that cool?"
"Sure, whatever. Then we take it out and dance all funky in public."
"Is that it?"
"Well, like not to the beat, just real spastic, and grab random people and dance with them. Jumping on cars is encouraged too."
"I love jumping on cars. Count me in."
"So you're going to do it with me?"
"Aggressive street dance?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. ... Yeah. I'm in."

So the next day we went out with a boombox loaded with the Chad Minddrive tape and hit the Magnificent Mile. That's a mile of super ritzy stores where I've never purchased anything. They have the 5 story Nike Store, the Cartier store with its super tiny little windows, the LL Bean store with a (n LL Bean edition) Ford Explosion in the front window. They have tourists. People to annoy. People to grab and dance with. But when we got there I was the only one willing to do some aggressive street dancing, even though I didn't know what it was.

After grabbing strangers and trying to force them to dance the the crappy Minddrive tape to no avail, jumping on a few cars and getting pushed out of the way several times I ran out of dance moves. So I resorted to the tried and true "fake seizure." I fell to the ground and spasmed.
It's immensely tiring, especially after doing the exponential wine drinking as long as I had the night before, so I quit after a few minutes. We got up and moved dow the street toward the park where we (mostly I) could rest for a few minutes.
That's when someone yelled from behind us, "Hey, come back here."
"Hey, you guys dancing, come back here."

We decided to run. We were trying, but with the sidewalks packed with strollers we weren't moving too fast. "It's probably a security guard or something. You know how these places are. Let's go."

Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. "Hey" he said.
Oh, shit. I turned.
"Here you go."
He gave me a dollar.

Posted by calculatoronfire at December 8, 2004 12:10 PM

Comments

so thats why you got all excited to go aggressive street dancing while I was visiting you... You got a dollar and that sparked its greatness for you.
I think you fell down the elevator shaft that night and tried to get into the limo of the guys who tried to buy coke from you. Do you still have the video from that night?

Posted by: nick at December 8, 2004 12:24 PM

Yeah. I earned a buck harrassing tourists, that's why I dragged you out to do it again. And yes, I've still got it on video... Trying to do a handstand in the middle of the street and falling flat on my back, knocking the wind out of myself thinking that was the worst injury I could get then walking into an unlight elevator shaft, falling, falling, falling like I was dreaming of falling and landing on my head.
The blood. the horror, the cleaning up the blood from the open wound on my head with a dirty wind-blown newspaper on the way to the dunkin donuts that wouldn't let non-paying customers use their bathroom.

When did the midget pimp with the cross dressing hookers come into play? Do you remember?

Oh well. I guess I'll have to bring out the video.

Posted by: brian at December 8, 2004 12:51 PM

You've got to love that aggressive street dancing. I was actually just reading an article on a new form of it called Krumping, pretty crazy stuff. Maybe I could make some extra money on my way from the train to work if I just aggressive street danced my way there. Hmmmm....

Posted by: anna at December 8, 2004 01:40 PM

let's see that mythical video.

Posted by: argyle at December 8, 2004 01:47 PM

Krumping? Oooh. That sounds fun. It's got a shorter, snappier sounding name.It must be better.
Do tell.
I bet that could earn you a quick buck dancing on your way from the train. Michigan Avenue is filled with people just itching to give their money to someone.

As for the video, it's not a video of the event described above. It's of a night time episode in Wrigleyville and Boystown (hence the midget pimp and transvestite hookers). If you've got a VCR I can show it to you. I think it is followed up by a some sumo wrestling matches. (I, by the way, am pretty much the king of drunken sumo wrestling, no matter what some others might tell you.)

Posted by: brian at December 8, 2004 01:59 PM

drunken sumo wrestling??? that sounds like fun. but let it be known: your tiger style is no match for my southern crane. unless of course you have to wear the loincloth deal, I don't think I could handle that.


someone must be cool enough to have a VCR.

Posted by: emma at December 8, 2004 02:52 PM

If this video were made in the heyday of VCRs it surely would have been a smash hit, but alas it was not.
There are tens upon tens of minutes of some guy that looks like a young luke skywalker filming his feet, then taking the camera into a men's room before I kicked his ass sumo style.
Who was that luke skywalker guy anyway?

I've got some other videos, one hanging out with a cabbie at a bar on the way home (I'm not sure, but I think the meter might have been running the whole time) from a night at the bars.
Why was the cabbie drinking?

If anyone has a VCR please let me know.

Posted by: brian at December 9, 2004 10:51 AM