Notas del episodio
Chapter 8: The Chicago Blues
At some point on the two-hour drive into Chicago I had drank enough beer to necessitate the use of the pee funnel for the first time. After the laughter ebbed, I stood up in the stairwell and scowled at the Chicago skyline to the west. It all seemed grey to me, the sky, the buildings, the fate of millions of souls bound together in such proximity. When the bus pulled off the highway at the exit for the University of Illinois at Chicago, the abundance of neon lights made things much more colorful, and all the hype about the Chicago Blues started to make more sense. The sidewalks were crowded with young people headed in all directions. Big groups, small groups, pretty girls, hot guys, black people, white people, Asian people, crazy people, you name it. This was clearly a multicultural hub with an amazing nightlife.
Driver Chris parked in the designated spot near the Chicago Greyhound station on South Halsted Street a few minutes after nine o’clock. Big Dave claimed to know the owner of the best blues club in the area. He had worked there as a bouncer back in the day, so we agreed to go with him to check it out.
Several of the girls tried to convince Flip-flop to come with us, but she insisted on staying behind because she could not afford it. A few of us guys offered to buy her drinks, but she said she did not want to owe us any favors. So, we said our goodbyes to Flip-flop.
Before we left Peruvian Ursula spoke to her traveling companion in Cantonese. Driver Chris assured her that he would be fine. She handed him the baseball cap, and we headed out as a group to the clubs on the campus of UIC. The short Chinese man walked behind me in front of Peruvian Ursula. Jewels and Yülia walked and talked with him the entire time. They asked him the standard questions, if he liked America. Of course, he did. How long he had been here? Three weeks. Have you been to Chicago before? He had performed at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
They talked about the places he visited around the world, of which there were many. When they asked about his family, he revealed that his wife and two sons were waiting for him in San Francisco. His English was fair at best, so they ended up doing the majority of the talking. He was friendly enough with hello how are kind of interactions, but I could tell much of the details of American English were lost on him, not to mention Yülia’s English with a German accent. He asked Yülia a few questions about Germany, like where she was from. She was from Dusseldorf. He asked her what she was studying in college. She was going for biotechnology.
Juliano strutted like a rock star walking with a hot Irish twin on each arm. Mountain Girl was not talking to him anymore, because he was such a flirt and he seemed otherwise enthralled with the Peruvian girl.
We stopped to listen to a trio of street performers playing the blues for tips at the entrance to a schoolyard. The leader fingered his way through the three-bar blues with amazing skill on an electric guitar plugged into a small battery-operated PA. The other front man played a harmonica with both hands wrapped around a mic amplified on the same PA. This created a heavily distorted mix of old-school blues. Behind them sat the one-man rhythm section banging on a pair of five-gallon bucket drums. Our group dropped some change and a few dollars into the open guitar case and moved on with Big Dave in the lead.
We walked past several bars with live music, occasionally stopping to listen from the sidewalk. Some of our passengers wanted to go inside one of the clubs. The place was hopping with a line out the door. A bouncer was checking IDs behind a velvet rope. We found out there was a show, but the cover was outrageous, so we kept moving. Big Dave reassured us that there would be no cover at his friend’s bar where he was leading us.