The Chicago Blogger

Seeing the city through someone else’s eyes

By Jeremy Schnitker

$6 haircuts
So I get my haircut at this little place at Augusta and Ashland. I’m not even sure it has a name. All I know is that it’s got a big red sign out front that reads “$6 Haircuts,” which is about as cheap as you can find in my parts. It was the first place I went to when I moved to the city roughly two years ago. One of my co-workers at the Starbucks I worked at when I first moved here said he rode by it on the bus every day, so I figured I’d check it out. (He didn’t actually go there, of course, he just told me about it. He was gay, and gay men don’t get $6 haircuts.

Well, I’ve gone there about a half dozen times since, and every time I’ve gotten a fine haircut — certainly one worth six bucks. But the folks that work there speak very little English, and that always makes me a bit nervous for about the first five minutes or so, because I’m never quite sure if they understand my instructions. If there’s one person out there you don’t want to misunderstand your instructions, it’s the person working on your scalp with a a razor and a pair of scissors. It’s not like ordering a burrito or telling a cab driver where to go. A mistake during a haircut is a mistake you’ll have to live with for at least a couple weeks.

So, like I’ve said, it’s all worked out fine so far. But if any of you see me one day with a bowl cut or a completely shaved head, you’ll know it wasn’t actually my idea.

The liquor store
If Nelson Algren were to come back to Division Street from the dead, I imagine he’d be pretty disappointed. He’d see all the new construction condo developments that took the place of his beloved (or oft-written about) Polish dives. The Jimmy John’s where there used to be boarding houses. The Boundary, where there used to be a Tug and Maul. The wealth where there used to be reality... and desperation.

That is, until he stumbled into Rite Liquors. Perhaps the last bastion of genuine tomfoolery, debauchery and misogyny left on West Division Street.

I enter the place frequently. To take cash out of its ATM, to buy vodka for my homemade cocktails, to buy mixers for said vodka in my cocktails. The place is the closest liquor outlet to my apartment. What can I do?

I walk by there in the morning, and the drunks are outside. Smoking cigarettes. Spitting last night’s built-up phlegm onto the sidewalk. It’s obvious 10 a.m. ain’t too early for them to start drinking. I know they’re doing it for a reason.

But I walk in there, with my $2,000 computer. My $300 iPod. My fashionable (or at least recently washed) clothes. I look like a corporate schmuck to the just-off-the-clock postal workers, the lifelong degenerate drunks, the missing-teeth tramps. But I know who they are. I’ve met them all before. I’m just a guy from Council Bluffs, Iowa, for Christ’s sake. They don’t know they’re nothing I ain’t never seen before. But they look at me like I’m some kind of different breed. Like I’m really any different from them. And when I walk out of there, with my leather bag, my vodka, my Sprite and my apparent spite for what they consist of, I just want to turn and holler: “I could have very easily been any of you, but I chose not to be.”

And I wonder if Algren would appreciate me for that, or spite me for it.

This town is full of weirdos
About two months ago, a guy walks into the Starbucks at Paulina and Division a couple blocks from my place. He’s was a decent-looking fellow: clean, well dressed, looked like he was of distant Eastern European decent. He steps in, looks around, walks straight up to me and goes into some spiel about how he works at the Drake Hotel downtown, but he’s out of money or something and needs money from me, and he’ll leave his wallet with me while he goes and does whatever it is he needs to do with the money I give him, then pay me when he gets back.

After listening to about 30 seconds of his bullshit, I just tell him I’m busy with work and that I can’t help him. And he leaves.

About two weeks ago, he walks into the same Starbucks, scans the place, then walks straight up to me and goes in with the exact same routine.

“No, man, I’m sorry,” just as he goes into the routine.

He gets a frustrated look on his face, stammers for a moment, then leaves.

I look over with amazement to my buddy who I’m sitting working with.

“That guy just tried pulling that same stunt with me about a month ago. Can you believe that? What a weirdo.”

Less than a week later from that, as I’m sitting by the front window of the same Starbucks, I see him pull up and get out of a shiny new black Pontiac. It looked like about a $25,000 automobile. He walks right into the Starbucks and again, approaches me.

“Dude, you just pulled the same shit with me less than a week ago!” I say incredulously.

This time, before he’s able to get a frustrated look on his face and stammer for a moment, the store manager comes out from behind the bar hollering at him.

“I told you before, damnit, I see you in here again I’m kicking you out. Get out!”

The scurveball shakes his head, goes back out to his shiny black sedan and leaves.

“That’s the third time in less than two months that guy’s pulled that routine with me,” I tell the manager and another employee as they watch him leave.

“He's in here all the time...” one of them replied.

As I sat there watching him pull off, I got the feeling it’s some sort of weird compulsive thing. Where, like, the dude just can’t resist trying to scam people. If he's out in public, he can’t help it. He doesn’t even need the money. He could lead an otherwise normal life, just, whenever he leaves the house, he can’t help himself from trying to get money from passersby.

It’s pretty messed up, and I bet he pulls the same shit again in the next couple weeks.

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