End of Daze

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

As winters go, the current capricious season has been as tolerable as any I’ve experienced sober since being administratively abandoned here 14 years ago against my will.  So what if I left a smarmy sales vice president waiting (with 45 life insurance presentation kits and a slide projector) in Baggage Claim 7 at O’ Hare International for an ‘inexcusable amount of hours’ on a cold March morning  back in 1990-whatever.  Big whoop. I figure the suited puppet is corporate milk toast by now anyway so I have  no regrets in that regard. A year and a half later I had my real estate license and thirty days after that, I sold my first multi-unit building for condo conversion. ‘God forbid’  the ass clown would ever think to spring for a cab. Thinking back on it now, that’s what he  most likely had to do.  I just don’t recall it being mentioned in my Fed Exed severance package that so quickly followed.

And what I’ve concluded since that liberating (if not sentimental) six-figure parting of  the ways is this: If ever there was a super-imposed bordered, semi-landlocked example of urban, bi-polar personality disorder just waiting to spit in the face of cabin fever, it exists in  my fair city, Chicago, between the months of November and April, pick a year.  And, as is the case of  so many frost-bound salesmen who have come and gone before me, my own personal demons continue to appear in a variety of veneers (with mere weather and  spirited drink being the least seductive of my temptresses anymore).

My final hours in corporate America began to un-tick in the following way one blustery weekend a millennium or so ago. I had been sitting on the same Viagra Triangle bar stool since Saturday morning when Last Call was finally announced.  I allegedly paid another unwilling patron to help me locate my car and drive me home. When I hit the pillow and cold crashed on the bed hours later it was the break of daylight the following Sunday. I needed to be out the door in exactly 24 hours to pick up my new vice president from his 8:02 AM  flight for an important Monday morning sales presentation.

When I awoke from my dehydrated coma and rack focused my blurry vision toward the general direction of  the deactivated alarm clock on my night stand, the numbers 7:07  burned my retinas digital red. I jumped up in a virtual panic, threw on a suit and Hermes noose, splashed on a handful of Bulgari, gargled a Red Bull and Diet Coke highball and flew out the door in search of my car.  Alas, God was looking out. I located the salt and cinder mottled vehicle less than a half block away, albeit double parked beside an alley dumpster with two City of Chicago orange tickets taped to my windshield and emergency flashers just barely groaning.  By yet another whit of Divine intervention, the engine turned over on the first twist of the key. I tossed the tickets into the glove box with all the others and tore westward toward the highway from my lakeside apartment.

Once on the Interstate, I needed to make it to O’Hare in record time. My BMW was running on fumes as I tried with one shaky hand to tidy up the interior.  No time to stop on this fated day. The road was empty of its usual bumper-to-bumper rush and I felt thrice blessed as I blew by mile marker after exit ramp neck- to-neck with the unraveling clock. I emptied the ashtray out the window and tossed as much as I could from the front seat to the back seat while driving, smoking, and curse/praying the entire way.

I recall glancing at my wrist as I slid sideways past the Valet attendant in Hourly Parking and into a handicap space, a crumpled twenty already clenched in my fist.  My watch read 7:55. I hustled alongside  the escalated  pedway until I located the nearest United monitor in Terminal 1.  Out of breath with thinned blood pumping, I stared bloodshot at the blinking  diode data for what felt like an eternity: Arrival. Departure. Gates. Times. Cities. Flights. Baggage Claim. Can’t. Figure. It. Out.

I looked up through the Helmut Jahn arched skylights above and made one last appeal to the Fortune 500 heavens. The sky was a hue of impending doom, getting darker by the minute. A full hour later with the boss man inexplicably delayed, my head throbbing and empty gut wrenched dry, but  still somehow standing, I realized it wasn’t Monday morning at all…but still Sunday. Sunday evening in fact. Darkness quickly swallowed my entire being.  And it  was still winter in Chicago.

I took a seat at the airport bar and vaguely remember drinking  with a pilot until closing; either a pilot or a baggage handler, I don’t really care to recall. I lost my car again. Towed somewhere. Declined credit card or something.  Took a cab back home to the lake  and woke up the following  Tuesday. Got Fed Exed on Wednesday.  Haven’t touched a drop since.

Except once. That was New Years Eve in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico.  In 1999. Just like the song.  But who has the time to muddle through that long story. Buy me a club soda at Bloodhound Unchained later this month and maybe I’ll spill the rest of the beans.