East Lake Street
I lived on East Lake Street for a year in 2008, a block or two from Powderhorn Park. I moved in on a Sunday at the end of May and after I finished I took a walk down Lake Street and everywhere I looked there were Mexican guys carrying bags of charcoal. Block after block. Seemed like they all had them. Everyone visibly equipped with grilling supplies. I was very excited to be moving out on my own, and was happy to be already learning new things: who knew Mexicans were so into Sunday grilling? I had never heard of such a tradition - and so widespread!
A few days later, I realized I’d moved in on Memorial Day weekend.
I lived in a duplex and on my floor there were two other guys. Tyler was super gay: a few months after I moved in, he said he thought he’d like to go by a different name, so could I call him Periwinkle. I didn’t. He worked at Subway and liked to mess with customers. One of his favorite bits was, whenever a black guy was ordering a sandwich, if the guy chose white bread, my roommate would pause, slowly raise his head until he was looking into the poor innocent’s eyes, open his own eyes wide, and intone: “WHITE?”.
He was endlessly entertained by this and told me about it again and again over the year that I knew him and always cracked up laughing. Sometimes if he worked the late night shift and the next day’s early morning shift, he’d sleep overnight in the store.
I met Periwinkle Tyler the night after I moved in, when a knock came at my bedroom door at 11pm, and I cracked the door. Through the space stared two fully-wide-open eyes, in profile because he was standing sideways: “Are you the new roommate?”
He told me about the previous guy who stayed in my room. This prior tenant would buy one of those whole chickens from Cub Foods or wherever, open it up, eat some, leave it open on the counter, go to work, come home, eat some more of it, leave it open on the counter, go to bed, wake up, eat some more of it, leave it open on the counter… by the end of every chicken he would be throwing up viciously in the bathroom in the morning, wracked with open-counter-chicken poisoning. I was told this routine never changed.
There was a Hostess Outlet store on the corner. I’d never heard of such a thing, and haven’t seen any such thing since. It was tiny, there must’ve been two people total employed there. and you could get Hostess Fruit Pies for like 60 cents. These things were 500 calories and I was poor and this place was a 30 second walk from my front door, so I ate them all the time. They only ever had Apple or Cherry, so I’ve never had any other flavor, but I’m googling the other flavors now and they look nasty (Lemon? Chocolate?? blegh), so that’s OK.
Next to the Hostess Outlet was a number of small Mexican grocery stores. There were at least two on the same block. They all sold the same stuff. I feel like there were actually three of stores all pretty much adjacent but that’s too crazy. I’d buy Mexican pastries and other stuff here. Mexican pastries - at least the ones they sold on Lake Street - are extremely, hilariously dry. I don’t know how they make them so dry, or how Americans make American donuts so wet. (American donuts don’t seem wet until you’ve had a Mexican pastry). The worst Mexican pastry is the most recognizable one:
Conchas are nasty and boring at the same time. And too many of them are day-glo colored. (Maybe you had a good concha in your life, and now you are mad at me, but the correct emotion is pity). It’s been too long and I never knew what any of the damn things were called but there were some elephant-ear looking ones that were really good. But really anything besides conchas. Since all the mexican pastries are so dry, this somehow also makes them less caloric, so I’d buy like 5 of them and eat them all and not feel like I was gonna pop and die.
Nobody at the Mexican groceries speaks English. I think this is still true. One of the girls at the cash register would give me these coquettish looks, and I was young and shy and it took me serious amounts of courage to ask her name, but I finally did and I was in a happy daze all day. I think it started with an S. I saw her dozens more times and we never had a single conversation and I think we literally could not have.
I loved the mexican apple pop - “Manzanita Sol” - and drank it all the time. I had barely tasted alcohol yet, and so still held the child’s ability - lost by all souls the first time they have a good cocktail - to find wonder in a new flavor of pop.
There were lots of small furniture and mattress shops along Lake Street, too. The language barrier appeared again here. When they had deals they wanted to advertise, they wanted to advertise them with emphasis. But nobody had told any of them about the function of bold or underline in American English, and everyone had gone with a different stylistic choice. So every month I rode past new signs for
“HUGE” sale
“big” discount
Apparently quotation marks are not used like this in spanish either, and bold and underline are used like we use it, so I still don’t know what was going on here.
My other roommate was Carlos. He might have been the only Hispanic guy in the three-block radius with an American accent. The first time I ever got drunk was playing Halo 2 in his room with him and Tyler. The three of us hung out a lot in the first few months after I moved in. But it was a small place, and Carlos apparently didn’t turn the doorknob when closing his bedroom door at night, and so the latch would click as it slid past the doorframe. This drove Tyler insane. Tyler was the type to talk about the same things over and over again, but there were no smartphones and I didn’t have a computer and I didn’t even have that many books, so I didn’t mind. But over and over Tyler would marvel to me in private about the incredible, fathomless insensitivity, the black cold heart, of a man who would not turn the doorknob when closing his door at night.
Carlos loved to get Moons Over My Hammy at Denny’s. Once, I invited a girl over for a date, cooked for her, and after we’d eaten, Carlos got home and came into the kitchen. He and I immediately jumped into 20 or 30 minutes of conversation, only nominally including the poor girl, except when Carlos said something she was greatly offended by and they began to argue. Writing this now, I remember the flash of fire in her eyes when he said whatever he said, and she leaned forward to argue. I remember sitting on the roof with her at sunset and proudly telling her how I’d dropped out of highschool, and seeing the dismay in her eyes.
From our unit on the second floor, you could climb out of the kitchen window and sit on a lower part of the roof, overlooking the back driveway. Tyler, Carlos and I would sit out there on the roof, and when the landlord came by and got out of her car, we would wave excitedly at her, like children, from above. She humored us.
Doing laundry involved walking a mile down Lake Street to a strip mall with a laundromat. I went with the guys sometimes but usually went alone. On one of these alone laundry trips, around midnight or so, middle of winter, I was walking there, with my duffel bag of clothes. Six guys passing by, walking the other way, thought it would be funny to surprise me by waiting till they were right next to me then yelling a loud noise in my face. At this, reflexively, a “fuck you!” came out of me. They did not think this was funny.
So suddenly I am in a fight with six midnight hoodlums. I sort of back up, keeping myself facing toward them, with them following. Instinctually I felt that these types are like dogs and that the worst thing you can do is turn your back and run - it gets their blood up. If they had stabbed me I suppose I would be telling a different story, with different lessons. One guy put a hand in his jacket as he walked toward me, as if he wanted to suggest he had a knife, but none ever came out.
Instead, I somehow manage to keep them all on one side of me, fists start flying, but since it is the middle of winter, and we are all poor Lake Street dwellers, we are all wearing thick Carhartt jackets (effectively the East Lake Street uniform, at least back then), and nobody hits anybody in the face, only the body, and Carhartts are of the kind of material that would be classified as Medium Armor in a video game, so everybody sustains precisely 0 damage. I’m not sure I felt a single one of the blows.
Soon enough, they disengage, one of them grabs my laundry bag from where I’d dropped it, they all gambol off for a quarter of a block howling and whooping, then drop the laundry bag and keep on gamboling away. I pick it up and, with it and me still in pristine condition, resume my walk to wash my clothes.
I remember walking to the same strip mall to Little Caesar’s and walking back with a pizza on Friday nights. Holding a large pizza was enough to be the talk of the block on the walk back: joking asks about “can I get a slice???” and congratulatory “damn, I know you’re gonna enjoy that!”.
It was only ten years later, when I returned to the city and moved into an Uptown apartment, walking by cold 20-something young professionals - a mile and a half from East Lake Street, but a completely different people - eyes fixed on the sidewalk in front of them, me feeling lucky if they looked in my direction, charmed if they made eye contact, my mind fucking blown if they said anything friendly - that I realized how much I’d had.
I remember the only party we had, in the winter, during a snowstorm, all of various high school friends I honestly didn’t know terribly well, packed into too small a space, and someone saying they were starving, and realizing I didn’t have any food, and taking my bicycle to Little Caeser’s in the driving snow, and biking back through unplowed streets, balancing two pizzas on one hand while I steered with the other. Everyone was wonderfully grateful; I still feel proud.
I remember reading Norwegian Wood in the kitchen in the fall as the sun set, and when [spoilers], throwing the book across the room and sinking to the kitchen floor and sitting there crushed for 15 minutes.
I remember sitting in the kitchen after a shower, wearing only a towel, sitting in one of our communal kitchen chairs, one of them walking out of their room, and immediately upon seeing me in the chair, asking me, nervously, to confirm I was wearing clothes under the towel. Of course I wasn’t! But his eyes were so afraid. I saw his concern in them - our poor little chair seat. I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I lied.
I met a guy on the bus, near the light rail station, while going home from work once, on East Lake. Black, old, looking homeless. The best of these types have the strongest opinions on how life should be lived, and the force of will to make you believe them, despite the dirty hoodie and plastic bag of belongings. He fired kernel after kernel of advice at me, and all sounded very reasonable, so after each, I nodded: “yeah”, “that makes sense”. Eventually he got tired of all this agreement, and told me,
“Men need to - you know - as a man - you need to be evaluating things for yourself. You can’t just go through life, nodding and agreeing with everything anybody says to you! You need to be willing to disagree sometimes!”
This sounded very reasonable, so I nodded. “yeah”, “that makes sense”. Then I was like… wait. shit.