Under The Lights

Before my dad ever taught me the rules of baseball, he made sure I was a White Sox fan. Each summer, we’d sit under the lights, watching the players and the field.

(and i can remember the time andy hawkins pitched a no hitter and the white sox still won; and when my dad caught a line drive off the bat of rickey henderson: how the ball was hooking away, and how he jumped into the aisle to spear it with two hands, spilling hotdogs and cokes and my brother who sat on his lap)

But what I’ll never forget is the ride to the game, my dad driving the old Volvo station wagon on routes he’d designed years ago. Ones which allowed him to avoid the Dan Ryan Expressway and take advantage of one-way streets.

(when i got older, i did learn their names, but when i was young, i watched the city’s south side flow by the car window, and i knew how close we were to the stadium by which neighborhood we passed through)

Every five blocks or so, the scenery changed. It felt like we were stepping out of Chicago and into another country. Then we’d leave that neighborhood for another. Then that one would fade and new one would rise in its place.

(first, it was the western border of the university of illinois, where the pavilion, an indoor sports arena, lingered like a dark, boxy shadow. then a public housing project. brick high-rises, where my dad said everyone who lived there was black. he did not have to tell me this. i knew by looking. people milled around outside, they stood in gravel parking lots next to hot-rods, they sat on stoops. and in the windows above, fans rotated slowly in the summer heat. my dad smiled at us as he locked the doors, but I could tell he wasn’t scared. soon we’d pass under a viaduct and enter a hispanic neighborhood.

spanish, my dad told me when i asked what language was on the signs.

what about people who don’t speak spanish? i asked.

they don’t live here, my dad answered)

And then we turned for the first time. Right.

(and an industrial neighborhood. dog-eared warehouses lining the road. graffiti everywhere, the spray-paint standing out from the brick. skeletons of profane words. full of desperation and love. there was life even in that sad stretch of the city)

Around another corner, turning left this time, we entered Bridgeport. Now we were only blocks from Comiskey Park. And my dad scoffed at people who paid five dollars to park near the stadium. He always found a spot on the street.

Coming from the game, my dad took a different route. Instead of Racine, he drove north on Halstead and ran through Maxwell street.

(on our way home, we drove in silence. If the sox had won, we listened to the radio; if not, the radio would be off. with the windows rolled down, the warm night air rose up from the dark pavement and swirled about the car)

My dad told me that during the day Maxwell Street clogged with people and trucks. It was three blocks long, shop after shop after shop. Most of them had been there for years.

(but at night the stores were closed, shut up, barred and dark. only an old man who sold hubcaps was still there, sitting behind a chain-link fence that marked his yard. the man stared at the sparse traffic as it slid by. above him rose his merchandise: mountains of silver glinting in the headlights. as we passed, i always tried to avoid the man’s gaze, but i always felt as if he saw me.

how could the man find the one he wanted? i asked.

My dad shook his head. he guessed the man had an excellent

memory for hubcaps.

how could he take one from the bottom without all the others falling down?

my dad just laughed. he said he didn’t know the answer to that question either)

Four years later, the Sox made the playoffs and I returned to Chicago. The city was electric. It had changed.

(on our drive, i saw that the pavilion had torn down. a few blocks later, the government high-rises had been replaced by two-story houses and, in the middle, a church. going home, we drove through what should have been maxwell street, but all the shops were gone. instead, skeletons of half-constructed condos rose out of the rubble. and the man selling hubcaps was gone too. his fence still there, but his yard was empty.

i wonder were he went, i asked my dad. i wonder if he is still alive.

of course my dad didn’t know. they’re now calling this area university village, he said)

We took the same routes we’d always taken. The streets were the same, but they were different. Gentrification had begun. The sights I’d seen as a child were gone.

The White Sox have never really been a baseball team. Instead, they are foreign languages, brown bricks, and the graffiti of Chicago’s south side. They are the city, the knocking down and building up. They myself as a little kid, silently watching.

(and when the sox play now, the games are shaded by this. the night-colors, the spray-paint, the piles of hub-caps, what is gone, what has replaced it)

In my absence, Chicago had changed. So had I. On the field, under the lights, the White Sox still played the same game. And I still watched with my dad. The two of us wanting nothing more than to see them win.