Sweet Talk and Hustle on the Easy Streets
My New Orleans street smarts are keeping me out of trouble while playing tourist in downtown Chicago.
Yesterday morning, I was discovered nosing around the entrance of a restricted area under East Lower Wacker by an employee of the city auto pound. I had noticed the dim, cavernous, vaguely forbidding space tucked under a busy street as I was strolling the Riverwalk. I couldn’t resist taking a quick peek. I have been drawn to such hidden places since I was about five years old. I easily talked my way out of this one.
Today, while sheltering from an early-morning rain shower during my return trip to our hotel with a box of donuts, I was politely asked by a uniformed security guard if I knew the fancy restaurant where I occupied a dry, covered sidewalk table was closed; her way of saying I needed to get out of there. I work in New Orleans. I knew how to handle this.
“Would you like a donut?” I asked.
“Oh, yes I would.”
She reached for my best one, a Boston cream.
That bought some time out of the rain. Soon, with sugar on her lips, she was asking, “Where you from?” and, “Did you get to Navy Pier?” and, “OK, I gotta go inside but you can stay til 9.”
Past 9 a.m., I guess I would have to come up with a cruller, or perhaps a cinnamon twist. No matter; I would be gone by then anyway.
Postscript: I was hustled out of another donut by the salesgirl in the Hard Rock Hotel gift shop . She is from Florida and likes Chicago weather “better than back home most of the time.“
I was lucky to make it back to our hotel room with two donuts for my wife. Donuts are a reliable, nearly universal currency but dangerous to carry openly.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.