(View Part I: The Introduction)
(View Part II: The Essay)
(View Part IV: The Second Response)

Nate,

I’m grateful for the opportunity to reflect on and respond to this unusual treatise on crime, class and homosexuality — God knows where you unearthed it. I’m a little dubious that you sought me out for my ability to “answer thoughtfully”; I suspect it’s more my special expertise you’re after, as a card-carrying criminal and certified homosexual. The question of a fag’s place in the socio-criminal sphere is actually one which I’ve pondered at alarming length, so I appreciate the chance to hold forth on the subject.

I know little about Pasolini. The thoroughly modern thing to do would be to Wikipedia the poor bastard; I’d rather stick to my own scant impressions of the man. I saw one of his movies: avant-garde claptrap that I was too stoned to fathom, if you want my honest appraisal. I also attempted to read “A Violent Life,” his semi-autobiographical portrayal of hardscrabble Italian hustlers. The book, I recall, read like a movie, an effect I soon grew tired of. It had a sort of early-60’s graininess to it, and evoked an obsolete era to which I had difficulty relating — “Pasolini was old-fashioned,” as Hocquenghem surmises. I seem to remember that Pasolini was killed not so much by a “swindler” as a hustler; the linguistic difference is subtle but significant.

He reminds me strongly of Jean Genet, another venerated avant-queer who always seemed too remote to fully fire my imagination. Both men ruminated compulsively over the intersection of crime and homosexuality. Both seem unrelentingly literary.

What strikes me about Hocquenghem’s eerie polemic is that it seems to straddle eras, his lens panning away from Pasolini’s quaint world of public-urinal-trolling seediness — wasn’t Senator Craig’s true transgression not that he sought out gay sex but that he had the Old-World effrontery of seeking it out in an airport men’s room? — as the modern, “integrated” fag comes into blurry focus. The question he raises is whether this generational shift has done anything to change the “delinquent” nature of homosexuality; and if so, what has been lost along the way?

The philosophical divide that Hocquenghem navigates is one I’m familiar with. In my late-night bouts of time-travel, I sometimes journey back across the schism of Gay Liberation and explore Pasolini’s turf. It’s a landscape that I’m drawn to, if one I don’t quite comprehend. In this noir-ish realm, homosexuality requires quite a bit of detective work, its rites secret and complex — baroque, as Hocquengem has it. Something turns me on about this insistence on secrecy and predilection for the darkened doorway — it appeals to the unliberated fag in me, who doesn’t feel comfortable holding hands with a man in public or fighting for gay marriage. A good part of me, in short, comes down on the side of homosexuality’s inherent delinquency, if only for the sex appeal of it — my “libido attracted by objects outside the law of common desire.”

Another part of me tends toward the Burroughs school of literary escapism, where homosexuality is not so much delinquent as it is the only game in town — an alternate realm where boy soldiers suck each other off as a matter of routine. Even further down this rabbit-hole lies Pierre Guyotat’s Tomb for 10,000 Soldiers, a psychedelic re-imagining of the French-Algerian War that is so incessantly mud-splattered, blood-soaked and semen-drenched as to be virtually unreadable. God knows I’ve tried, several times, but it’s like staring at the sun, and after only a few pages my vision is fried. Here, delinquency doesn’t even hint at the depths of sexual violence; the book makes Pasolini’s hustlers look like choirboys.

But what do these flights of fancy have to say about our position today? Certainly, from a liberal-establishment perspective, the opportunities for a young faggot are brighter than ever. I might not reasonably hope to become, say, the President of the United States — despite what they always told me! Democracy has its limits — but I’m more or less free to be queer and pursue my life’s interests unimpeded by sexual orientation. I can, at least, seek out sex without undue fear of being murdered. Which is all well and good. But, as Hocquenghem remarks, “let’s not confuse self-defense with respectabilitization.” Or, respectabilitization at what cost? The author’s briefcase-toting, mustachioed, ad-exec fag seems outdated; let’s take this Hocquenghem on a stroll down modern-day Halsted Street, that he might witness establishment homosexuality in its full flower. Well-heeled fairies parade in $100 jeans; cultural activity on the strip is largely underwritten by multi-national beer companies, and if the season is right he might catch the alderman stumping for votes at the Pride Parade. The author might hang around the corner or Roscoe and Halsted for months on end without hearing anyone mention the “struggle for liberation”; he could haunt every fag bar in town and not find anything sordid or grandiose.

And yet, has delinquency really vanished entirely, or has it merely found new avenues for expression — moved, as have so many other human activities, online? Craigslist, for example, maintains a bustling bulletin board for anonymous sex, a sort of vast, virtual public urinal more sordid and grandiose than anything in Pasolini’s day, a pervert’s buffet of gangbangs and gloryholes. Is it a “freemasonry of crime where the homo and the murderer interact”? Maybe nothing as hysterical as all that, though I do offer the following news item: New York-based radio journalist George Weber was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, in late March of this year, bound with duct tape and stabbed upwards of 50 times; the confessed killer was a troubled 16 year-old hustler (the New York Daily News described him as a “Satan-loving sadomasochist with a knife fetish” — sordid enough?), who Weber picked up on Craigslist. Much as in Pasolini’s day, many commentators saw the victim as being every bit as guilty as his murderer; even on gay sites like advocate.com there was a great deal of finger-wagging — “They were both wrong,” one poster advised. “The victim shouldn’t have been having sex with a 16 year-old to begin with, much less supplying him booze and drugs…” How much, then, has really changed? Hocquenghem perhaps underestimates the indomitability of homosexual delinquency. Plenty of dark recesses, I think, remain in the homosexual sphere.

I was searching for the Townhouse Gallery, a multipurpose art establishment at which I would attend an exhibition opening later that night.

I arrived at my approximate destination and wandered into a nearby Hilton, approached the balding Egyptian man at the Information Desk and announced that I was lost. He chuckled and gave me a map, then scooted me out the door. I told the concierge outside which street I was looking for, and he said it began beneath a billboard we could both see from the hotel steps. “Great,” I thought, and took off in that direction, only to learn a few seconds later that he had neglected to mention that in between where we had stood and the beginning of Mohamed Bassouny St. stretched the four busiest streets in the world.

Cairo traffic is a seething, fluid mass of chaos, rubber and metal. Lanes aren’t even guidelines, and the cars are packed around each other on all sides, with motorcycles in between. It is more impressive in scope and composition than the pyramids. It’s a hulking beast that operates according to the riddle of the sphinx.

Luckily, my days as a traffic control worker on highway construction sites have steeled my nerves in respect to cars zipping by my vulnerable body at close quarters. One learns quickly that a car must only miss you by a quarter of an inch, or less, for it to do absolutely no damage, no matter how fast it is traveling. My friends with whom I’m staying here explained to me that crossing the menacing lanes of Cairo is largely an act of faith. “You step off the curb, and … Insha’Allah,” they said.

I also observed on my first days in the city a tool used by Egyptians that seems to help put God on their sides when venturing on foot into traffic. I call it “The Cairo Force Field.” It’s always a good idea to find a local going the same way you are and to cross busy streets downstream from him, because people who live in Cairo are masters of this tactic, but if you are on your own or have gained sufficient confidence to cross by yourself, learning the force field is a must.

There is a secret language to Cairo traffic. A single honk from a driver means, “I’m going,” as in, “there is a gap in traffic in front of me and although you other drivers around me might be intent on filling it, in fact I am going to fill it.” A double honk means, “Get out of the way, I’m coming in,” and so on, with slight variations.

The Cairo force field is a pedestrian tool and is something of the adverse to the honk. When a person is crossing a street and using the force field, which is actually just a hand held out with a palm facing oncoming cars, it means, “I’m going,” as in, “I’m going to walk out in front of you now because I have ascertained that you have seen me and are going slow enough to be able to not run me over.” It’s really amazing how well it works. It’s like holding two magnets with similar charges together – they simply repel each other. It’s as if cars have positively charged magnets in their front bumpers, and when you’re in Cairo crossing the street, you have them embedded in your palms.

The force field only works on cars moving forward, however. A favorite, utterly befuddling move I have seen here repeatedly is when a cab or bus driver misses a turn, and instead of going around the block or flipping a u-turn, they simply back up into oncoming traffic. The drivers, understandably, do not want to be backing up into oncoming traffic for any longer than they have to, so they go as quickly as possible. No force field can stop them – you simply have to jump back onto the curb and be thankful for your life.

This video is not mine:

Total time spent in Lawrence, Kan., during that same time: 25.5 hours

My Megabus experience: great, save the theater dorks making noise next to me on the way back and the meaty smell of everyone’s sandwiches after we stopped at Steak ‘n’ Shake.

My friend Ryan’s Megabus experience: not so great

Was the trip worthwhile? Yes it was.

The following is a letter of disclaimer I suggest you present to future guests to your home based on my experience of staying at your house last night. While I appreciate your hospitality immensely, something like this would have gone a long way toward making my stay more comfortable and enjoyable.

Yours,

Nathan C. Martin

+++

DISCLAIMER:

Dear friend/relative/train-hoppin’ hobo to whom I gave my number last time you stopped through town on your way on the rails out West,

Thank you for choosing to stay at my home during your visit to Salt Lake City. This means a lot to me, because it indicates that I am one of your less anal-retentive friends that is still cool enough to allow such things to happen, while so many of our former cohorts have become old and lame and use excuses like, “I have to work early in the morning, and you might wake the baby,” when asked if a friend can crash his/her two dogs, smelly backpack, bandmates, random bar drunks, and startlingly unwashed body upon their furniture. I appreciate this greatly.

However, instances in the past have urged me to present all prospective guests with the following disclaimer, which I hope will clear up any confusion during the ridiculously simple process of occupying my home for a short amount of time for the purposes of free warmth and shelter.

This particular disclaimer is intended for guests who will be staying at my house while I am out of town on one of my raucous escapades. If you believe this is not your case and that you may have received this situation-specific disclaimer in error, feel free to contact me and I will provide you with an alternate version.

1) Make sure that I have not moved. I am of the ramblin’ vagabond variety, prone to up and leave whatever dwelling I currently occupy at a moment’s notice. Although it is unlikely that I will neglect to inform you that I have moved since the last time we saw each other, this has happened in the past. Before you pick up the key to my place from our bearded mutual friend, simply ask: “You live at the same place as last time I visited, right?” This will prevent such embarrassing situations as you standing in my old, empty apartment asking me via cell phone where the hell the bed went, while I try to direct you downstairs to my new bedroom through the door to the left of the kitchen, which, in my old apartment, is the door to the broom closet, in which, as you will discover after a thorough inspection, has no hidden staircase.

2) Remember the address to my apartment. If you do find yourself stumbling around confusedly in the apartment I am currently in the process of moving out of, and we clear up on the phone what has happened (after we both assume momentarily that the other has totally gone insane), pay close attention when I tell you the address of my new place. This will save you the trouble of walking into someone else’s home one block north of my new abode, and having to scurry quietly out after announcing your presence to a blaring television and hearing a startled man-cough come from the bedroom in reply. Such situations are pleasant for no one, and can be easily avoided by paying attention.

3) Bring your own utensils, and everything else. Since I am in the middle of a move, it is likely that there will be absolutely nothing in my new house to assist in the comfort of your stay. Things that you will probably not find there include: dishes, toilet paper, furniture, a shower curtain, and food, among many others. If you show up in the middle of the night after twelve hours of travel and try to cook a frozen pizza, you will likely be required to pull it from the oven using a keychain and a sock, onto the box in which it was sold to you, where you can let it cool until it’s touchable enough to pull apart with your fingers into manageable portions. I do have a bed, but it consists of two separate pieces: the mattress, which sits barren on the floor of my room, and the bedding, which has been lying in a pile of sog and mildew in the washing machine for three days.

4) Believe me when I warn you about locking yourself out. If I say to you, “Watch out for the front door, because it’s really easy to lock yourself out,” it is because this is a real-world problem that I have had to deal with personally, and it sucks. The problem is exacerbated when you lock not only your keys in the house, but your cell phone, too. However, if you do not heed my warning and find yourself stupefied at your own ignorance on my porch in the late hours of a December night, do not tromp immediately off into the darkness to look for help or curl up under your overcoat. My house is old and not airtight, and in fact I am accustomed to leaving the window to the living room closest to the kitchen unlocked. You might have to scale a few feet of rock wall and tear through some plastic insulation, but this small feat of acrobatics is much preferable to sleeping outside.

5) If all else fails… If you, like one of my hapless friends who stayed at my home last December while I was away in California, have the great misfortune of arriving in Salt Lake City late after a long day of travel, first go to the nearly vacant apartment I am in the process of moving out of, then march into the home of some poor hippie schmuck whose address bears close resemblance to mine, then want to cook some food but find not a fork or plate to aid you, and then lock yourself out and have to crawl back in through the window, there is still comfort to be found in my fridge, because though completely void of food, it almost always is populated by some beers. The keychain that holds my house key has a bottle opener on it, and after some rest on the floor with a couple of brewskies, you won’t even mind falling asleep beneath a comforter that is still noticeably damp.

Quimby’s Bookstore is a haven for the literate eclectic. Comic book enthusiasts and fiction aficionados feel equally at home among the scattered racks and tables stacked high with printed guides to everything from radical poetry to political philosophy, craftivism handbooks to macabre art. Though not short in any sense of gems straight from the professional printer, Quimby’s collection of handmade zines and chapbooks has made it an international destination for those who relish the underground network of DIY publishing. In the point-and-click era, Quimby’s remains a major hub for those who stay true to the write-print-fold-staple-send (as in, with a stamp) method.

Quimby’s opened in 1991 in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood with a mission statement penned by original owner Steven Svymbersky: “I really want to carry every cool, bizarre, strange, dope, queer, surreal, weird publication ever written and published … because I know you’re out there and you just want something else, something other, something you never even knew could exist.”

Seventeen years later, Quimby’s is based around the corner from its original location and operates under the stewardship of Chicago Comics owner Eric Kirsammer. But even as Wicker Park has morphed from a sort of dingy bohemia into a host for chic boutiques and bank branches, Quimby’s has remained relatively unchanged. Chicagoans come to find the newest issues of their favorite independent publications, most of which Quimby’s sell on consignment, and visitors from around the world seek it out. (Quimby’s manager, Liz Mason, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, said the store is something of “a tourist destination for cool people.”)

Quimby’s fiction selection is relegated to only 12 shelves, but the denseness of its quality makes one wonder how the planks stay fastened to the walls. Five steps sideways can move your eyes over titles by Sam Lipsyte, Will Self, Dave Eggers, John Fante and Ed Park. Mason explained that the process of curating the fiction stacks is entirely up to the employees, whose sensibilities are largely in line with those of the clientele.

Besides its role as bookseller, Quimby’s also offers its space to an array of book-related events. Whether it’s Timothy Archibald presenting photographs and anecdotes from his book on homemade pleasure devices, Sex Machines, or members of the Temporary Services collective describing their tribulations dealing with penal authorities during the creation of Prisoners’ Inventions, each occasion offers its own delightful bafflement.

During a stop at Quimby’s on a recent reading tour for her novel, Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth told the audience, “When I lived in Chicago, I came to Quimby’s all the time, and I thought it was the coolest place on earth. … I was definitely not cool enough to be in here. So when they invited me to give a reading, I was like, ‘Wow, I have reached the pinnacle. I am officially cool now.’ But when I showed up, I felt strongly that I still wasn’t cool enough to be here.”

Don’t let the shop’s coolness dissuade you. Visit Quimby’s at 1854 W. North Avenue in Chicago, or online at www.quimbys.com.

That’s the title of a term paper?

Be glad it’s not your name.

The permanent inhabitants of my apartment found themselves occasionally outnumbered this week by expatriates. Some friends who live in Spain — an American and an Italian — visited in the midst of a tour of the United States, and during the several times my British friend Beth dropped by, my roommate and I were a minority of people who live in the country of their citizenship. All of the others were illegal, and the overwhelming question they were facing or had already faced or would face was, What now? We moved to another nation. We left behind our homes and focused all our energies into a remote receptacle, vaguely fashioned plans in hand, and did what we could to force our square, rigid bodies into circular slots — another culture, another language, laws and customs we were familiar with only from websites or study-abroad jaunts, monolithic bureaucracies through which we had to travel with a matchlight’s worth of guidance offered us by our respective embassies, and the screaming emptiness of the world that only displaced people know ringing insistently in our ears. Sanity, money, and bare social survival have been our only goals since we planted ourselves in foreign soil, and now that we have spent a year or two or four on our adopted continents, have jobs that pay cash and prospects of legal working papers, legit apartment leases and a sense of the rhythm of an alien life, we must find something to do with our excess efforts, having established ourselves beyond the threats of poverty, jail, solitude, and death. When we left our countries we were looking for life, not hiding from it. We want responsibility and purpose. We want careers and expertise, definite pursuits, and we want them here, and not there, where our parents looked for and could not find all of this and more.

There is a point any person of worth will reach when living abroad at which s/he becomes sick of the vacation. There are, of course, expatriates who never tire of the permanent state of cafés, travel, and half-assed agendas. I lived with one in Buenos Aires. He was a 35-year-old wealthy German Turk whose nearly singular intent seemed to be the creation of acquaintances with “interesting women,” and to ascertain upon my return to the apartment from the bar, park, grocery store, bathroom, etc., whether I had met any women of this type along my way. He was supposedly studying medicine and had just finished a program at a local public hospital, to which, he told me daily, he meant to return to in order to pick up some certificate of completion or another. This man was actually running from his country. He did not want to be a doctor, or anything remotely related to the field. He never bothered to improve his shoddy Spanish (his was good enough to get him occasionally laid, and was therefore good enough for him). He had no urge to explore the city or the country, and in fact did not particularly like Argentina, but knew beyond a specter of a doubt that he wanted to avoid going back to Germany, where his father would make him get a real life. He either did not receive the memo that outlines internationalism as something founded upon the interaction of people whose endeavors amount to more than cross-cultural chit chat, or he simply scanned through and sent it back to the kitchen with his slightly soiled latte napkin.

Moving to and staying in another country is like throwing yourself onto an incline of ice and trying to gouge your spiked cleats into secure footholds before you slip off the glacial precipice. Enrolling in university is one of the most common methods of doing this among the middle-class Americans and Europeans I know, but as college degrees amount to less and less in the eyes of employers who are cutting back their hiring regiments in the face of a depressing world economy anyway, only top-tier applicants can really count on securing jobs that will comfortably subsist them in desirable expat locales. These people are not migrant farm workers escaping Third-World plights in order to send money back home to their families, and they don’t even really want to work in bars or restaurants for too long. My generation feels entitled to jobs that they do not consider below them. Americans my age have never seen hard times or even severe economic or political turmoil. We do not think we should be forced to work our way up from the bottom of the ladder, and as companies increasingly adopt horizontally integrated business models, we often find ourselves without ladders to climb at all. As the period of initial expatriate vacation draws to a close for many of my friends, the dearth of options (that of returning home not being one of them) threatens to encroach into their lives as a sort of paralysis. A visa is denied. An international company shuts its office. An internal audit forbids management from further paying illegals. A trajectory into a fixed foreign existence that looked from one’s original nation to sail smoothly upward begins to flatten out sooner than expected, and one finds himself in a static state, far away from wherever once was home.

Christian moved to New Zealand because he wanted to live in a place where he had never been and where he knew no one. He chose the Kiwi Empire because of its progressive political policies and abundant natural resources. I ridiculed him for electing a country that is so utterly removed from any position of international prominence that it is essentially the nation-state equivalent of a hippie commune.

“But they are pioneers of wave power, Nate,” he tells me. “Wave power.”

I must say, however, that Christian’s destination choice was much more thought out than those of almost all of the other expatriates I know. While many of my friends are aspiring journalists, artists, academics, or fashionistas, Christian is a machinist and a welder. His luggage on the flight to Auckland included a suitcase full of metal-working tools, strapped shut with duct tape. He had the foresight to research which fields the ongoing exodus of New Zealanders to Australia and beyond had left wide open, and found his trade skills would make him an asset to their labor force. Customs in New Zealand hands out work visas like grocery coupons, and he has had little trouble making money. He even found an old man to sell him a sailboat, and when he hits the expat what-now plateau, he will simply set sail for distant horizons and seek out new adventures. This may be about as productive in terms of internationalism as endless discussions of cultural peccadilloes among lazy foreigners in sidewalk cafés, but when it comes time to face the historians’ inquiries about how he spent his 20s, he will be anything but short of answers.

The S.S. Reginka

Before I left to live in Buenos Aires I visited Chicago to meet with a cousin of a friend to discuss the prospect of obtaining employment at a school the cousin ran that certified people to teach at English-language institutes. This was December 2006. The cousin was on sojourn from Argentina after his porteña girlfriend had grown bored and dumped him, and it turned out that in his absence the Buenos Aires local government reclaimed the building that housed his school, which led to its consequential nonexistence.

We went to a Blackhawks game and afterwards to the cousin’s apartment in Pilsen, one of the many traditionally immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago that have recently become target destinations for high-rise condo development at the dramatic expense of its current residents. Pilsen is predominantly a Mexican neighborhood at the moment, and the cousin, my friend, the cousin’s roommate, and I ventured to a local bar where we, the only patrons, could down preposterous numbers of Negro Modelos and tequila shots and talk Spanish with the bar man and his wife. I sat agog most of the night listening to the cousin’s roommate recount the story of her Bolivian girlfriend’s murder in Costa Rica, which included a gripping segment in which nearly the entirety of the town in which they had lived together blamed the roommate for the killing. I noted her situation and any remotely resembling it on my list of things to avoid in Latin America.

On the way to the bar, the cousin pointed out a tall white pole with a blue light flashing on top, and explained it was one of many police cameras set up around the city in high-crime locales. If there’s any of these in your neighborhood, he said, you’d be best off to watch your step.

I moved to Chicago one week ago today. I live in a totally refurbished apartment with high ceilings and hardwood floors in the heart of Humbolt Park. A street pole with a blinking blue police camera stands at attention around the corner from my building.

This is not the only evidence at present that suggests I live in ‘the hood.’ The police are plenty busy around here. I watched them pick up a crackhead down the block on my first day in the apartment and on the second my landlord, a photog for The Trib, said he’d spent the morning shooting a corpse-adorned crime scene two streets north of the house. The reason I can afford to rent the beautiful space I do on a paltry journalist’s salary is that Humbolt Park is dangerous, but much less than it was in the very recent past. Five years ago, a person of my complexion and appearance would have been seriously ill advised to venture down Evergreen Avenue after dark, even though most of the violence was/is gang related and has nothing to do with whiteys from Wyoming like myself. Sure, you can get robbed anywhere in the city, but skinny pale bulls eyes are even more tempting when they’re wandering alone through impoverished areas that are already prone to violent crime.

Today I can look out my window and see people who would make my mother nervous if she encountered them on the street, but other than avoiding dark alleys I take no real action to protect myself, because I don’t feel the need to. I’m keyed into a relatively safe role in the cycle of gentrification that’s been spinning Chicago into something totally different since the height of White Flight, and I suppose I am playing my part to perpetuate it — even while I exploit it.

After World War II, the nation’s economy boomed, Detroit put an equal amount of effort into producing civilian cars as it had into making army trucks, and the cash-flush middle class roared in their Chevys and Fords out into the vast suburban expanses. At this pre-civil-rights-movement point in history, the drivers and their wives and children were white almost without exception. This opened up a housing vacuum in the inner city, which was filled by blacks and immigrants who, in their poverty and general societal position as those who rich whites shit upon, lived in and among these urban leftovers as they transformed into the storied ghettos that became icons of racial and economic inequality throughout the last half of the 20th century.

But something has happened in the past decade or so: Rich whiteys have realized that the suburbs suck. They are utterly devoid of culture and character, they represent the vapid materialism that has made the rest of the world think of America as greedy and obese, they nourish no sense of community whatsoever, and now that gas prices are quadruple what they were ten years ago and the economy is in the toilet, Friday-night jaunts into the city for a good time are becoming financially untenable. What is there to do but dump that six-bedroom stucco mansion now that the kids have gone off to college, pack all you would be able to fit into a well-lit loft, and head for life as the urban elite?

First they filled up the places where rich whites who never left already lived — downtown and the north side, in Chicago. But then there wasn’t enough space, property got pricey, real estate agents looked for alternatives and developers smelled opportunity. They sniffed around, and stumbled upon bohemia. It turns out that among the immigrants in the dangerous neighborhoods lived artists and people of all shakes who were dedicated to one sort of interesting unprofitable venture or another and took advantage of the cheap rent in the ghettos to set up communities of their own. They opened up lively cafes, galleries and shops, played in bands whose music made the nightlife exciting, wrote and painted and created until a glimmer of life shone outward from these blighted neighborhoods and attracted the attention of even those yuppies whose senses had been most dulled by years of painfully boring suburban existence. They began frequenting these bohemian enclaves, slumming among the hip. Coverage of the going-ons in these areas moved from the alternative media into the mainstream. Everyone took note. The buzz reached the ears of the corporate world and suddenly GAPs and a Starbucks sidled up beside underground record stores and vegan eateries. Developers bought dilapidated buildings and replaced them with housing that rivaled the luxury of the fanciest suburban home. The police were sent in to protect the new wealth, and the gangs were driven out. The cost of living raised and the artists couldn’t afford rent. They moved on to the next neighborhood, which was still unsavory enough to keep apartment prices low, and began to build their bohemian communities anew. The hoards continued to flood in from the suburbs to fuel the cycle that would begin and begin and begin.

I had a fantasy once that this cycle would spark some sort of revolution. Gentrification would push the gangs and the artists further and further out from the center of the city until they had nowhere else to go. In their final refuges on the outskirts of the city they would organize. The artists and gangs would come together — the first providing the knowledge of the history of social and cultural revolt, and the second would bring the weapons. Put under enough pressure, they would begin to fight back together against the developers and the police with all means and tactics and reclaim the neighborhoods they had been forced to abandon. Then I began to look at the model of most contemporary European urban areas. White Flight never happened in Europe — the suburbs never caught on as desirable destinations. The upper class has made the centers of cities its strongholds and the poor and immigrant communities have been relegated almost entirely to the fringes, where they have little access to commerce centers, jobs, hospitals, and public transportation. Every few years the Paris suburbs burn with flames ignited by Arab immigrants, fanned by the general dispossessed. The police crack down, politicians make promises of reform, and everything stays the same dismal way it was before.

Perhaps this is all those of us who follow this pattern around America cities can hope for — a few car fires that remind the wealthy that we’re still around, and a state of general neglect. As the cycle continues, I will either move further out where the rent is cheap or make enough money to live in a less-interesting neighborhood. The mansions in the suburbs will be subdivided into multi-family homes, whose occupants walk an hour each way through the Illinois winter to their jobs as servers and cooks in chain restaurants in mini malls. The rest of the homes on the block I live on now will be remodeled and filled with venture capitalists. The streets will be safe for white children to ride their toy bikes up and down, and in December the blinking blue lights that alert criminals that the eye of the law is upon them will serve as top ornaments for extravagant fake Christmas trees that will be fashioned limb by plastic limb to the poles that I was once warned acted as beacons to alert me that I should probably be watching my back.