The blue line is a route for trains in Chicago that runs from O’hare airport international to forest park, i think. sounds right. i lived on this thing for several weeks in my shell of me. sneaking on to the trains and using it as a shuttle to and from all of my scumbag deceptions and pan handling. i could take the train all the way north up to the airport and get off there, meander into the suburbs, do what i needed to do, and then come back to the train, and take it south, back to the green line switch, and then back to the west side.
The CTA provided my every move throughout the city and outskirts. i could take the red line down to 95th and as far up as Wrigleyville. Or i could take the orange line out to the south west, near midway. all it was was a rail express to more and more potential victims. I remember not looking at people like I do today. Every person, every store I entered was at risk. i would do whatever it took to get more heroin.more crack. to feel less. i hated who i had become and felt like every where i went the world was looking at me funny. like i was a suspect. i was. This was a particularly empty time for me. I was living on the streets of Chicago. Lost. Alone. Scared. I weighed about 140 pounds, all my meals came from discarded bags behind restaurants, unless I was lucky enough to save a couple dollars at the end of the day. Most of the time though, I was not. I hadn’t showered in God knows how long. And I rarely slept. I nodded out a lot, but sleep was foreign to me. The tail was wagging the dog at this point, and it seemed like I was just watching. Like I was having some sort of strange outer body experience and I remember hoping that I would just wake up from all this. I didn’t. Still limping from my staph infection, I had a velcro boot on, because sliding my injured, stinking foot inside a shoe was just not an option for me. I limped and hobbled my way all over the Chicago land area. Using the CTA railways and buses as my main mode of transportation. I remember having a very strange feeling on one particular day. It was brutally cold outside. I was rapidly approaching a real stopping point. Every ounce of resource inside me was completely gone. I was burned up. It took everything inside of me to just walk. My thoughts were poisonous and I wanted to go home. I was licked. If I could Just make it back to the blue line platform on Homan, I could use someone’s cell phone and call for help. It had been weeks since I talked to family, and I’m sure they’d love to know I was alive. So that’s what I did. It did not go the way I thought it would. I wobbled my way down the ramp to the low lying platform between opposite facing sides of the Eisenhower expressway. There was one lady standing down there. Thank God I thought. “Excuse me maam, may I please use your cell phone?” She did not want me holding her phone, I guess people had been snatching cell phones all over the city at the time, and she was leary. Damnit, why hadn’t I thought of that? She asked for my name, the person’s name I was trying to contact, and the number. She dialed and spoke for me. I asked her to ask my grandmother to speak to my dad. After a few uh-huhs and yes maams, the lady covered the mouth piece, turned her head from the phone, and said “Your grandmother died.” And I had missed it all, I had no idea what was going on at home, because I simply was not there. I had missed everything. Her passing, and the funeral. She was gone. And so was I. Right back to the westside I went. I definitely did not want to feel this…
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