My Father Tries to Teach Me His Map of Chicago

The Bus Chasers by Maggie Andersen

My father is a man of shortcuts and a mental map of Chicago. He has never needed a paper map or a GPS, has never relied on a cell phone for navigation. He knows how to get anywhere in the city in under twenty minutes, and when you give him an address, he has the easiest route calculated within seconds, and a story to go with it. Sometimes his information is outdated: he thinks a neighborhood is still a Polish enclave when it’s been Mexican for years, or he refers to a recently gentrified area as a Puerto Rican port of entry. But he always knows how to get there, and can usually find a bakery or coffee shop in the area where someone still knows his name. He gets energy from fanning out into the neighborhoods and striking up conversations with strangers. His is the art of conversation, of asking questions and caring about the responses, of knowing when and where to leave the best tips. Maybe this particular brand of education inspired him to push me out of our neighborhood when it was time for me to go to high school. 

“Time to grow up now,” he said one day, as he handed me a CTA bus token. 

Two buses to get to my all-girls high school, an hour and fifteen minutes. He had to take the expressway downtown for work, so decided my freshman year that we should carpool. He would deliver me at the Belmont and Kimball bus depot, which cut my commute in half, a brilliant shortcut. He dropped me while the car was still moving, then hopped on the expressway to make it to roll call on time. We were saving precious minutes. 

On my first day, in late August, 1991, the plan worked remarkably well. My father walked into the bedroom I shared with both my sisters, and made his way lightly past their bunkbeds. He sat down on the edge of my single bed, touched my shoulder, and whispered, “It’s almost 6:00. Whaddya say?” My first time waking up in the dark, but he’d been doing it his whole life. We padded around the apartment in our bare feet, waking up, and then I dressed in a white polo, itchy plaid skirt, and navy-blue knee socks. On the kitchen table, I found a small glass of orange juice next to my mother’s ashtray from the night before and a typewritten poem from her. It’s time to get your bus fare. Thirty-five cents and a dime. You’re getting to be such a big girl, little girl of mine. 

“I know,” my father said, sensing my teenage sadness. “But it’s time to move on.”

He sat down and watched as I drank my juice, offered to make me breakfast, but I declined. He handed me the backpack we bought at the Lane Tech bookstore just last week while my elementary school friends milled about, buying folders with the public school mascot on the front. They compared class schedules and planned to walk to their first day together, while I would be taking two buses to a college prep school in the suburbs where nobody knew my name. I tried to conjure my friend Amber Torres, who had said, “Damn girl, you’re so lucky though. I wish I was going with you to that preppy-ass school.”

It was still dark when we got into my father’s Caprice, an undercover narcotics car. We drove up California Boulevard, past the gas company, and when we turned at Belmont, my dad told me the plan. He was a police officer and knew it wasn’t safe for young girls to wait for the bus on unlit corners, so he’d drive up to Kimball where there was a lot of traffic; I’d be safe there. Years later, when I am an adult, he tells me that one of his worst cases was a high-school girl who was brutally raped on her way to ROTC at five o’clock in the morning. The heartbreak of his career was delivering her to her father, a pretzel of a body in a raggedy blanket. 

American songs from the 1950s blared through the car’s speakers, via my father’s favorite oldies station.  

“Okay,” he said. “I see the bus. Get out and wait right there. You’ll go past Pulaski, past Central, past Harlem. You remember what the school looks like?”

I just wanted him to drive me all the way, to listen to Elvis Presley a little longer, but I didn’t say any of this. I got out of the car, closed the door while he was still talking, then boarded the city bus, dropped my token into the slot, and showed the humiliating picture on my student ID. The bus driver said good morning, then we crawled down Belmont in rush hour, through neighborhoods I’d never seen, picking up all kinds of characters along the way. There’s the Marshall Field’s factory; XRT’s radio station; Club Jedynka, the storied Polish disco; and the Italian cafes where old men played chess and smoked cigars. I was fascinated by these neighborhoods because we didn’t have any Polish or Italian kids at my elementary school, and that felt significant, only because we had every other ethnicity you could point to.

When I arrived at my new school early and didn’t know what to do with myself, I sat in the cafeteria with a few other early-birds, who all seemed to know each other from their schools before this. I sat alone and wrote about the bus ride: the hungover morning deejays wearing sunglasses, the carousel of Catholic school-girl skirts, public school kids wearing starter jackets and Air Jordans, the woman who threatened to spit on us every day, and the driver who hummed to himself so that he wouldn’t lose his mind. 

By the middle of freshman year, the morning scene at my house went more like this:

“Mag! I’ll leave you! Let’s go already! Goddammit, you’re gonna make me late.” 

I was in the habit of staying on the phone with my boyfriend until 2 a.m. I hid in my closet on the phone and bribed my sisters not to tell. My uniform hadn’t been washed in weeks, and I was scribbling algebra problems in the car as we sped down Belmont Avenue. Al Andersen checked his rearview mirror every few seconds for signs of the bus.

“Here it comes!” he cried. “Get your bag on your lap!” 

This was when my stomach knotted up. I was stuffing the algebra back into my bag with five other textbooks, while the zipper ripped at the seams, and my pen exploded black ink all over my uniform skirt. Just then, the bus sailed past us, and now it was time for the chase; my father turned into Mario Andretti, and I held onto the passenger’s side door as he ran the red light, blew the stop sign, almost ran over an old woman crossing the street. 

“See what you did?” he said. “You almost made me hit her.” 

He swerved into a gas station parking lot and spun out on the other side so he could squeeze in front of the bus, then he pulled up alongside the green machine and hollered frantically at the driver, who seemed to be ignoring him. The other kids on the bus looked down on the scene and laughed. The bus driver rocketed forward without us. 

“You’re gonna be late,” my father said matter-of-factly as the bus chase began again. 

“Oh well,” I responded.

“This is your fault, not mine, sister.”

He loosened his tie and this was the moment when my mother would say, “Go ahead, Al, have a heart attack.” I wanted to say this too, but instead I jostled around in the front seat as we rode the bus’s ass and came close to hitting it several times. Two miles into the chase, we looped around the bus, the light turned red, we screeched to a stop, and the driver idled behind us. 

“Get out!” my father screamed. “Hurry up, goddammit!”

I rushed up to the accordion doors, gave a polite tap, and they opened to me with reluctance. I stepped up and slipped my token into the slot. Just as I was settling into my seat, ready to relax, I heard my father’s voice.

“Mag! You forgot your goddamn lunch!” Now, the man was banging on the bus doors with a brown paper bag, onto which he had printed my name in his chicken scratch penmanship. Maggie “A.” (I’ve never been sure why he put the A in quotation marks.) The bus driver rolled his eyes and the public-school kids on the bus were now dead of laughter and big city rush hour honked incessantly at my father. He sprinted back to his car in full suit and dress shoes, holding up his middle finger to everyone behind him.

“My daughter forgot her lunch, you asshole!” 

My sophomore year, there was a weekend field trip to the university downstate for a high school theatre festival. I packed my things in my grandmother’s suitcase, a cumbersome paisley monster. Everyone else’s parents were driving them to school (see: luggage), and I didn’t want to ride the Belmont bus with my falling-apart backpack and the suitcase, so I told my father I’d be taking a cab.

He chuckled, looked at my mother and said, “Get a load of this one. Last of the bigtime spenders.” 

Then he looked at me. “Do you even know how much a cab costs?” 

A cab to my high-school would’ve cost about fifty dollars, which was significantly more than my 45-cent student bus fare, but it was absolutely worth it to me to spend my entire piggy bank. 

He laughed again and said, “I’ll drive you, just this once. Such a spoiled child.”

The next morning, when we started down Belmont Avenue, I felt like a champion. A lot of girls at my school had cars, but this was somehow better. My father was the greatest driver I’d ever known, and he knew all the shortcuts. His Caprice was always clean and warm, no puddles of melted snow on the bus floor to get my backpack all nasty. No kids from other schools making fun of my uniform, or creepy men looking up my skirt. No distressed passengers yelling in my face. Just a peaceful ride, me and my old man and the oldies station. I knew he would get me there on time and I felt sorry for the other kids waiting for the bus, but today I was not them. 

When my father stopped at Belmont and Kimball, my heart dropped, as if from a rooftop.  

“Come on,” he said gently. “Let’s go. I’ll carry your suitcase.” 

He effortlessly handled my luggage, set it down next to the driver, and paid my bus fare.  

“You always tell me you’re tough, right? Have a good trip. Don’t forget to call your mother.” 

Off he went in the narc car, and off I went, tripping and falling down the aisle of the bus with my hideous luggage. The kids from Madonna Academy and Steinmetz High School were having an absolute field day with this one. When I finally found a seat, I looked at my father out the carved-up window and pressed my middle finger against the glass while he laughed with big white teeth. I knew this would be the family joke at dinner tonight while I took improv workshops with my friends downstate. Several miles later, I arrived at the Catholic school and dragged my suitcase bumping along behind me down the street. My friends saw me from their parents’ cars.

“I thought Al was driving you,” one of them said.

“He made you take the bus with your grandma’s suitcase?”

Cue the laugh track.

My junior year, after a dramatic argument, likely about the boyfriend he didn’t approve of, I told my father I would take both buses. I told him I would go my own way and I didn’t need him anymore. I woke when I wanted, left when I wanted, ate whatever I wanted for breakfast. Several days in a row, he followed me in his car, in the dark, to Western Avenue, the longest city street in Chicago. He pulled up beside me, and said, “Come on now, get in the car.” But I planted my feet at the bus stop while commuters filled up at the gas station across the street, and the waitresses at Jeri’s Grill served ham and eggs to their regular customers. My hair was all icicles. My father sat there in the gray light beneath the streetlamps and looked at me from the driver’s seat with a defeated expression that didn’t match his suit and tie. Eventually, he peeled off in a way that let me know he was angry and that once again, I had won, though it didn’t feel that way. After he drove away, I imagined him sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on his way to a job he hated while his teenage daughter, with her braces off and perm grown out and skirt rolled up too high, stood on a busy street corner, pretending she didn’t know him. He drove to work with the memory of a 15-year-old girl shivering in a blanket, her father falling to his knees.

For a few years, I took public transportation alone and kept secrets from him, sometimes found myself transferring at the wrong place or overcome with fear on an empty train car late at night. Maybe we made up when I decided to go to college in the city, on his recommendation, when he would sometimes drive me to the Blue Line subway to help shorten my long commute. Once, I saw a lady from the campus food court waiting for the bus in the rain, so he pulled over and offered her a ride.

“Can I give you a lift to the train? I’m Maggie’s father.” 

She didn’t know me by name, but probably did recognize me, and it was really coming down. 

“It’s raining and you don’t have an umbrella. I’ll just get you to the subway where there’s cover.”

When she accepted, I worried that the car smelled like my mom’s cigarettes, but she didn’t seem to mind, and if she did, she was too polite to say so.

My father drove me to the airport for all the trips I took without him. When I started dating my husband in my early thirties, he said, “I’m not going to be a chauffeur like your father, you know.”

At 35, I have my first child. My father, now retired, sometimes gives us rides to the pediatrician on the South side, the other side of the city, where I have to go as a grad student because we can only be seen at the university hospital. He drives with the baby seat in the back and takes us for lunch after our appointments. In the neighborhoods I want to explore, I request the chic new Mediterranean place or the cozy Scottish pub, and he occasionally indulges me and inevitably ends up close-talking with the owner, no matter their age or background. One guy says, “I like your father. Around here, we call him Mr. Whispers.” More than one person calls him The Mayor. Usually though, my father prefers the time machine restaurants that remind him of a different Chicago, or what he might consider the soul of it. The Breakfast Club in West Town, the White Palace Grill on Canal Street—breakfast and lunch, nothing fancy. He likes running into his friends from back in the day and knows exactly where to find them. Retired police officers, precinct captains, and community organizers from all 50 wards. 

At Moon’s Sandwich Shop on South Western Avenue, we see Mr. Hunter, an older Black gentleman about my father’s age. Best precinct captain on the West side, my father tells me. Mr. Hunter is a sharp dresser and speaks softly.

“Is this your grandson, Al?” Mr. Hunter says. “God is good.”

 By the time my son was born, the diner had been here for 80 years. Jimmy Radek, the owner, comes over to say hello and take our order. Big Austrian hands, sweet blue eyes Jimmy Radek. My father says he was a police officer for a stint, but turns out, he liked feeding people better. I order the meatloaf and my father the pork chop sandwich; Jimmy says he’ll bring the cook’s famous grits for the baby.

When Jimmy goes back to the register, Mr. Hunter slides into our booth. He and my father tell me stories of Moon’s during the race riots of the 60s, how it was a community space and a safe haven. It’s like Do the Right Thing, but the owners have historically paid their employees well and understood the underlying reasons for the riots, never tried to hook up with their sisters.

“It’s no accident,” Mr. Hunter says, “that no one ever threw a brick at Moon’s.”

“Mag,” my father says. “Do you understand how close the riots were to where we are right now? We’re at Madison and Western.”

I must look like a dunce because he and Mr. Hunter start complaining about how us young folks couldn’t find our way around Chicago without a phone if you paid us a million dollars. They double over laughing. When I ask them what’s so good about this place anyway, my father and Mr. Hunter say it’s the fair prices, but a random customer shouts across that it’s the pickles. Another says it’s the mustard on the meat, mayo on the bread. I realize that my colicky baby isn’t crying, and that’s unusual, so I remind myself to tell him about Moon’s someday, will myself to remember the wood-paneled walls and the simple white sign out front with Moon’s in black cursive writing and cinderblock windows. The men eating lunch here are Black or white, but they seem to take collective pride in Moon’s as a place that didn’t shut down or board up during the race riots of the 60s, and that detail is enough for today. They read newspapers instead of their phones, and understand that butting into a conversation is not rude, but neighborly. Jimmy Radek brings the check, and I grab for it, but my father swats me away.

“Don’t you disrespect your daddy like that,” Mr. Hunter says.

“We’ll see ya next time, Al,” Jimmy says.

“Don’t be a stranger now,” Mr. Hunter says.

“Have a good one,” the other customers say.

My father picks up the infant seat and carries my son outside, but tells me to buckle the seatbelt.

“I don’t know how to do it,” my father says. “People get so crazy about safety these days.”

My son starts to fuss once he’s buckled, but my father knows that the oldies station will calm him. 

“Okay, Champ,” he says to him. “We’ll be home soon. Take a rest.”

He drives me all the way home today, all the way down Western Avenue, the longest street in Chicago, with my precious cargo in the back. He turns up Gene Chandler on the radio and drives slowly today, no buses to chase. When he senses that a driver behind him is impatient, he pulls over and yells out the window, “Go around me then, if you’re in such a fuckin’ hurry!”

He looks at me apologetically. “I don’t wanna speed with the packzki in the car.”

And I know that this, the way I love my son, and the way my father loves him, is the only way we know how to say unsayable things. As we drive down Western Avenue, we grow older. I’m trying to make a map of the city with my father in it, but the truth is: he’s been the cartographer all along, steadfastly believing I’d learn to read his directions. 

Turn right to see an explosion of beauty and left to see what is almost beautiful. Stay on this street for a while and imagine all the lives lived here. Imagine a future for those children playing, and turn the corner for a good, secret place. Take down the addresses of taverns and candy shops on residential corners and make sure to return to them someday—walking traffic means safety. Spend money in your neighborhood, but also where you do not live. Get on the bus and thank the driver, every single time. Read the poems scratched into the seats and look out the window, not at your cell phone. Pay attention, my father’s map says. Pay attention. But I still don’t know the shortcuts.

My father weaves in and out of residential streets, waves on pedestrians, turns up the music when the song is good enough, and slows down when he’s told. This is how you take a child halfway without doing everything for them, his map says. This is how you teach them the responsibility of living in a city, and this is how you tell them I don’t want to leave but I will, and you are who I will miss the most. He drops me at the front door of the three-flat he bought when I was a baby, where I now live with my own. This is our favorite part of the map, the end of the hunt, X marks the spot, I guess. 

“We’re here,” my father says softly.

All he wanted was for his children and grandchildren to have easier lives than he did—I’m not sure that dream has come true, but I try to keep that from him most days. 

“You’re home,” he says to my sleeping baby.

If I’m not from here, I’m homeless.

“Will Archie have to take the Belmont bus?” I ask. 

“My packzki? Never. Papa will drive him to school every day.”

Watching my father reverse down the street at full speed like a lunatic, I know that in his eyes, I will always be a child, and in mine, his hair will stay shiny and brown. I also know that he didn’t get out of the car because his legs are too weak now to take the stairs. I don’t know if he will ever drive my son to high school. I worry about my son’s generation without the benefit of their grandfathers. 

My baby boy sleeps in his car seat, and sunlight leaks through the trees as we walk the crumbling concrete path to our family building. We arrive at the front entrance, the original door from the 1920s, weathered wood and windowpanes. Inside the vestibule, the air is cool and the mosaic tiles are stained from decades of neglect. The mailbox slots are full with debts to pay. This is where my parents brought me home from the hospital. I jiggle the key in the sticky lock, smell the memory of my mother’s cigarette smoke in the walls, my son smiles in his sleep. I still don’t know the shortcuts. I still have to read the maps. 

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